


Hold Close Your Fear

by lustmordred



Category: The Following
Genre: BDSM, Bondage, Burning, Cutting, Edgeplay, Hardcore S&M, Knifeplay, Knives, M/M, Masochism, Needles, Risk Aware Consensual Kink, S&M, Sadism, Sadomasochism, Strangulation, Whipping, glass
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-01
Updated: 2015-08-11
Packaged: 2018-03-26 13:44:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 58,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3852937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lustmordred/pseuds/lustmordred
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ryan knows Joe Carroll better and more intimately than anyone. More intimately than anyone would ever believe. There is more to their story than has ever been told to the world and Joe could ruin Ryan if he ever spoke of it, but he won't. It's theirs. What they have is secret. Ryan reluctantly begins to come alive again playing Joe's newest painful game. Love hurts. And that's good, that's really good. It's the only kind of love that makes sense for Ryan and Joe, but that doesn't make it any less real or true. Their love cuts deep, it leaves marks and a trail of blood in its wake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I.

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this during season 1 of the show. It is based on that and doesn't involve anything from later seasons of the show; characters or events. Some scenes are taken directly from the show because they are relevant to the story. Typically, I hate that kind of thing, but since this is meant to take place within the events of the show, some of it felt like it needed to be there. I apologize for this to those who, like me, don’t really like such things most of the time.
> 
>  **BE WARNED** that I have not warned for _everything_ , though the things I haven’t warned for pretty much fall into the same categories as those I have warned for. You should also know that, yes there is a story here, but this is also about 85% smut of the kind you would never ever want your mom and dad to catch you reading. This is not playful S&M, it's bloody and painful and mean, as it should be. I would recommend you _not_ read it at work.

Over this odd world, this half the world that’s dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.

_Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs_

The dark was like looking into the abyss; Ryan could feel it looking back. His hand on the wall came away wet and sticky, smelling of the salt on pennies. He was familiar with the blood on his hands. He touched his tongue to the palm and it tasted the same as it always had.

A rustling whisper of shifting fabric alerted him to movement in the absolute dark and Ryan automatically looked around for the source of the sound. There in the deep blackness, he felt the heat of a body draw close to his back and smelled him. It was a scent he knew like the blood on his hands. A subtle, soft combination of expensive soap, the dusty acids in old paper and good scotch whiskey. There might be blood under his fingernails, or just as easily not, but if it was there, it would be Ryan’s blood. 

“Joe?”

Instead of an answer, hands closed on Ryan’s waist. Something burned in the dark, a striking match with a dull orange glow lasting only a second, followed by the smell of burning tobacco. Ryan knew what was coming and closed his eyes in the dark, waiting for it. When the first touch of heat burned the back of his neck, he let his breath out and didn’t jerk.

“Does this hurt?” Joe whispered in his ear. 

Ryan bit down on his bottom lip and nodded. 

“Would you like me to go deeper?”

The cigar was smoldering against his skin. Ryan moaned and Joe pressed it in. The fire hissed and the pain was exquisite. He couldn’t help it anymore, he jerked. 

And came awake, alone, to the sound of his cell phone, lost somewhere in the bed, ringing. He sat up, fighting his own hangover as he pushed up from the mattress, and it stopped about the time all the blood surged to his head to pound in his temples and behind his eyes. He took a few breaths, rubbed his eyes and tried to shake the dream off, and the phone started ringing again. He reached across the bed and found it under a flap of the comforter. 

It wasn’t a number Ryan recognized, so he ignored the call and tossed it aside. 

Joe was still in his head. Ryan could still feel the burn on the back of his neck stinging. There was a scar there. There were many scars there, small and round as distant moons, across his shoulders. The most recent one was nine and a half years old. The burning was a phantom pain, just like the smell of him that lingered in his nose. So familiar that Ryan would know it in the dark if he were struck blind and Joe never said a word. 

He thought more and more about Joe as the date of his execution drew near. He had been having more nightmares and dreams in the last year than he could remember having in a long time. He drank more, if that were possible. 

It would be soon now. Soon, and when it was over, maybe the dreams would go away. Or maybe they’d just get worse and never stop until he went mad or drank himself to death. 

Ryan pushed himself up from the bed and dragged himself to the bathroom to pee. While he was in there, the phone started ringing again, but he ignored it. While he stood in the open door of the refrigerator and drank a bottle of water, it started ringing again. He turned his head and glared toward the bed. 

Whoever it was, they wanted to talk to him pretty fucking bad. Maybe it was important. Maybe it was his sister. Maybe something had happened. Maybe she was dead.

Probably not. 

He closed the refrigerator door and finished the bottle of water. Then he picked up the television remote and turned on the TV, not interested in watching it, just wanting the background noise to fill up the silence. 

_…he was a professor of literature…_

Ryan looked around at the TV. Across the bottom of the screen, beneath footage of a helicopter, in capital letters four inches high that screamed from the television, Joe Carroll’s name leaped out at him. 

**JOE CARROLL PRISON ESCAPE**

No. It was impossible. It could not be true. He was still dreaming. _This_ was the nightmare. 

_So far, five guards are confirmed dead…_

Ryan changed the channel, but it was there, too. 

**SERIAL KILLER AT LARGE**

_…from prison early this morning. As you may recall, Joe Carroll was convicted in 2004 for the murders of fourteen young women… ___

__And there was Joe. Joe’s smirking, handsome face looking back at him from the screen. Ryan stared, in the back of his mind listening to the echo of Joe’s voice, “ _Does this hurt?_ ”_ _

___…who attended the university where he was a professor of literature…_ _ _

__The phone rang again. Stunned, Ryan answered it. “Hello?”_ _

____

He despised Agent Jennifer Mason almost from the moment she opened her mouth. She was arrogant and she resented his presence in a way that bordered on rudeness. Ryan was hung-over and didn’t want to be there in the first goddamn place. He was doing _them_ the favor. 

And Agent Mason didn’t seem to know who Sarah Fuller was when he asked about her. Or maybe she just didn’t think it was important.

Ryan walked into Joe’s cell with her right behind him, watching everything he did, and threw his bag down on the bed. It made a heavy sound; hard mattress. The cell had been Joe’s living quarters for years, but there wasn’t much of him left behind.

“He’s scheduled to be executed next month,” Mason said. She was feeling him out.

Ryan crouched down beside the bed to look at the books stacked up on the floor beneath it. “The twelfth,” he said. Did she think he didn’t know? That he hadn’t been thinking about it every day for years?

Poe, Faulkner, Hawthorne, Melville, Shelley, Byron. All the old favorites were there, stacked up like books on a shelf, with no dust upon them. 

“Still the romantic,” he said. He hadn’t thought that prison would change Joe much, but he did wonder how it was he never got tired of reading the same trite old crap. 

There was a drawing on the wall. Washed charcoal, black and white, of a lighthouse. Ryan gazed at it, thinking Joe had been so much better at so many other things besides writing. Thinking how like Hannibal Lecter it was, his talent for art, and how apt and unsettling the comparison. 

His own book was on the only table in the room, behind the bed. Ryan picked it up. “Who let him have this?”

“Anyone could have,” Mason said evasively. 

_That is not an answer_ , he thought. He flipped it open and found the note Joe had left for him and read it with Mason’s eyes on him. There was Joe’s handwriting, his scrawling, half cursive, half print handwriting. As he began to read it, Mason began to recite it from memory and he stopped to look at her, suddenly angry. 

She was playing with him. Or she was studying him. He was there to help, to _consult_ , probably to capture their man for them all over again because he was the one who knew him best. Oh, how he knew him. 

“Dear Ryan, I enjoyed your book. Have you ever considered a sequel? Best, Joe.”

She looked so pleased with herself. Ryan eyed her, thinking how it didn’t really sound like Joe. It wasn’t quite right; it was too concise.

“You never mentioned a note,” he said. 

Instead of explaining herself, Mason said, “Any idea why he left that for you?”

 _Because he knew I’d be here to find it and he couldn’t help himself_ , Ryan thought. What he said was, “He enjoyed my book. It says so.”

She realized he wasn’t going to give her anything, that her game had backfired, and Mason suddenly looked a little alarmed. “I think he’s letting us know that he plans to kill again.”

Ryan picked up his bag and walked by her out the door. He gave her the note. “Yeah, that’s probably it,” he said, and kept going. 

He had come all this way to help them catch Joe _again_ and all this little girl wanted to do was fuck with him and play games. He was not in the mood for games, not where Joe Carroll was concerned, not anymore. If there was another reason why she had brought him to Joe’s cell, after it had already been searched and tested, then he couldn’t see it. 

“Look, I read your file. I know you don’t play well with others…”

Ryan turned on her, his anger reaching for the surface. “You read my _file_?”

“Yes, I did,” Mason said. 

“So, you know me, is that what it is?” Ryan snapped. 

She didn’t know _anything_. Not about him and certainly not about Joe Carroll. If she did, Ryan wouldn’t have been there at all. 

Mason stood there a moment, but then she backed down and walked away. They needed him. She couldn’t afford to pick a fight with him now.

Ryan stood listening to Mike Weston break down Joe’s psychology, thinking about the water bottle of vodka in his bag. He wanted a drink right then almost as much as he wanted to tell Mason to go fuck herself before he caught the next ride back to Brooklyn.

He wasn’t listening. He didn’t need some kid who still looked like he hadn’t graduated from college yet to tell _him_ about Joe. Besides, the boy didn’t know anything that wasn’t public or part of their ill-informed profiling anyway. In nine years, Joe had never deigned to speak with a psychologist, and more than half of what he said to anybody else should never be believed. 

“…It would go on to be a bestseller, but in its initial printing, it was a commercial and critical flop,” Weston was saying. 

Ryan tuned in just a little and looked up as Weston passed in front of a screen, and there was Joe again, that same smirking mug shot staring out at him. Had Joe been thinking about the infinite number of times Ryan would have to look at that photograph through the years and remember when he smiled that tiny, almost not even there smile of his for the camera? He knew it was possible. The man was a sadist after all. 

The picture flicked away and there were the dead girls. Well, the dead girls and Sarah Fuller, alive, but not for lack of trying on Joe’s part. 

“This triggered his picquerism,” Weston said. 

Ryan blinked. He looked down at the floor and didn’t say anything yet. 

“The act of stabbing; slicing flesh for arousal,” Weston explained. 

Stabbing, burning, cutting, whipping, breaking, bruising… for arousal. Yes, Joe had been interested in all of that, but what Weston was talking about was wrong. “That’s not accurate,” Ryan said. 

Weston turned to stare at him, but Ryan was still looking at the floor. Still remembering. 

_Does this hurt?_

“I’m sorry, would you like to say something, sir?”

Ryan blinked and looked up at him. He shrugged and shook his head. He didn’t want to say anything. He wanted to be miles away from there, still in bed and dreaming. 

“By all means, if I’ve got it wrong, please correct me,” Weston said. He hit a button on the controller in his hand and the open cover of Ryan’s book replaced the dead girls. “Ryan Hardy.”

Ryan sighed. “Joe Carroll was obsessed with the romantic period. His lectures consisted of Thoreau, Emerson--in particular, his hero, Edgar Allan Poe.” He dropped his satchel bag on a fold-out chair. Director Franklin had said to educate them, so he would educate them. “And like Poe, he believed in the insanity of art; that it had to be… felt. He didn’t just eviscerate fourteen female students. He was making art.”

Ryan turned his head and looked right at Weston, who looked eager and a little bit thrilled by his presence. “He cut out his victims’ eyes as a nod to his favorite works of Poe. The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat. See, Poe believed the eyes are our identity. The windows to our soul. To classify him as a picquerist would be…” Ryan smiled and ran his tongue over the back of his bottom teeth. “Too simplistic.”

Weston wasn’t offended by the criticism. On the contrary, he looked like he wanted to applaud. Thankfully, he restrained himself. When he came over to introduce himself and shake Ryan’s hand, Ryan realized something: If he wanted Mike Weston, he could easily have him. He could have him for nothing. His hero-worship extended that far, maybe farther. 

Ryan wasn’t a hero, just a drunk who knew how to write a sentence. He didn’t want him. 

Which did nothing to stop Weston from trying to impress him. Ryan didn’t want to be impressed. All he wanted was for Joe Carroll to go to sleep and never wake up on the twelfth of the next month and disappear forever from his life as he should. Weston could go back to worshipping his paper hero, and Ryan could drink his vodka, take off his tie and go back to bed. Alone.

**2003**

What happened between them didn’t start in a bed. Such things rarely did. It started in Joe’s study one night over case files, Edgar Allan Poe and drinks. Too many drinks, Ryan would later think, though he wouldn’t blame it all on being drunk. Joe had a way about him. A way about him that Ryan would still be struggling to explain to himself and to others years after Joe had been locked away. He looked at Ryan and not only _saw_ him, but _understood_. What he wanted, what he needed, and how the two things were not the same. He saw how Ryan _was_ , but also how he _wanted_ to be. 

Without a conscience to stop him, Joe used it against him. 

Ryan didn’t look at the inscription when Joe first wrote it on the inside flyleaf of his book and passed it to him. He took it with thanks, thinking he would look at it later, then offered Joe twenty dollars and felt the first lick of desire settle into his alcohol-warmed belly when Joe laughed. It was a real laugh and Joe was watching him. Sometimes from the corners of his eyes, but not always. Ryan knew that look, and the feeling of eyes running over his skin in an admiring, covetous way. He didn’t often experience it in the presence of men and it took him a little by surprise to feel it while sitting across the coffee table from Joe.

He finished his drink and began packing up the books Joe had given him and his papers and files. Ryan didn’t hurry and he didn’t linger, but he was going to leave. He really was going to. He hadn’t slept in over 24 hours and he needed to or he’d be worthless. It was hard, though. Hard to think of sleeping and turning it all off for any length of time while the killer was still out there, maybe even picking his next victim. 

Then, of course, Joe said something to him that changed his mind. 

“I couldn’t turn it off if I were you,” he said softly. He watched Ryan with his eyes at half-mast, a product of a little too much of his good scotch. “Must be hard with friends and family and you’re running around trying to chase down the bad guy.” He frowned, thinking about it. “I imagine it uh… it gets quite lonely.”

He was right. Though he talked about it, Ryan never really did turn it all off and he was _so_ lonely. His own fault, people said. People who knew him, like Jenny or Ty. That was his real curse, that was what Ty said anyway. 

A little taken aback, Ryan looked at Joe and didn’t quite know what to say. It wasn’t a compliment, but it wasn’t pity. It sounded like sympathy or even empathy. Joe studied him, waiting for a response, but Ryan just looked back at him. He didn’t tell him he was wrong or that he was right, and when he said nothing, Joe’s gaze drifted away from him for a moment.

“But the pay-off, huh?” Joe said. He smiled, still just talking, still with that understanding, unspoken invitation for Ryan to speak up, to unload; confess. “You know, helping people. Saving lives. No, I think what you do… is quite remarkable.”

Ryan didn’t speak, but he was nearly embarrassed by it all. Joe was seeing him in a much whiter light than he deserved. The man he described, the motivations he spoke of with such compassionate understanding, wasn’t Ryan Hardy, it was the man Ryan Hardy wished like hell he could claim to be.

As Ryan remained silent on the subject, Joe hesitated. His eyes flicked away from Ryan, moving thoughtfully back and forth. Then he smiled and said, “One more, huh?”

It wasn’t quite a challenge, it was more persuasive than daring. It was seductive and Ryan didn’t really want to go home, a fact Joe had clearly homed in on through his hesitation to leave. Though Ryan had recognized the sexually appraising weight in Joe’s attention toward him, he liked the man. Liked him probably more than he had liked anyone in a very long time. Though he knew it wasn’t true, he thought one more drink wouldn’t hurt anything. One more drink could hurt a lot. A lot could happen in the time it took to finish one drink. Still, he didn’t want to go yet. His apartment was empty and dark, he lived alone and somewhere out there was a killer he hadn’t caught yet. So far, he was still a failure. He shouldn’t be allowed to lay down his head to rest. 

One more and he would go home, he told himself. Start anew the next day. 

“Sure. Why not?” Ryan said. 

Joe laughed, pleased, and poured them both another drink from the decanter on the table between them. Ryan picked his glass up and was lifting it to his mouth when Joe reached over the table, took hold of the collar of his shirt in one hand and pulled, drawing him close. Ryan had only a moment to think before Joe just dragged him in and kissed him. In that moment, Ryan could have stood up or twisted out of Joe’s grasp--it was, after all, only the collar of his shirt--but he didn’t. He realized what Joe was about to do and he let it happen. Joe pressed his mouth to Ryan’s and leaned out over the table to get close enough before he pressed his teeth to Ryan’s lips and nipped him. Surprised, Ryan opened his mouth and Joe slipped his tongue inside. He tasted like bitter whiskey and faintly of tobacco and something spicy. Ryan liked it and chased the taste of him with his own tongue until their tongues were stroking over each other and before he knew it, they were just kissing. Kissing like it might become something more than kissing if they weren’t careful. Kissing with _intent_ , both of them. Ryan didn’t really consider what that intent might mean or lead to in those groping instants, but he knew, and still he didn’t stop or push Joe away. 

The sound of the outside door opening and slamming closed broke through the near dreamlike surreal sensation of it all and alarm shot through Ryan like a bolt of electricity. He jumped up, yanking his shirt collar out of Joe’s hand as he stood, and wiped the back of his hand over his mouth. 

“That would be Claire with the little one,” Joe said. He watched Ryan calmly from his seat on the couch and picked up his drink. He tossed back the scotch and put the glass back down before he stood, too. “Finish your drink, Ryan.”

Ryan looked at him, looked at his glass, still with his drink untouched on the table, then back at Joe. Joe smiled at him, his eyes mocking as he watched to see what Ryan would do now. Was he going to get mad? Was he going to be embarrassed? 

The sound of Claire’s heels on the floor could be clearly heard out in the hall as she approached the study. 

Ryan’s heart was beating a little too fast and his hand shook when he reached for it, but he leaned over, picked up the glass and drank his scotch while Joe watched him and his smile widened. 

“Have lunch with me tomorrow,” Joe said. 

Ryan looked down into the bottom of his empty glass. He shrugged and gave the glass to Joe as he nodded. “Sounds good,” he said. He met Joe’s eyes briefly and smiled. “Sure. Lunch tomorrow and maybe I can pick your brain a little more.”

“I look forward to it,” Joe said. “You know where my office is?”

“Yeah, I think I can find it,” Ryan said. 

The door opened and Claire stood in the doorway. She smiled to see them there. “Hello, Agent Hardy. Still here?”

“We lost track of time,” Joe told her. “Agent Hardy was just about to leave.”

“You don’t have to leave on my account,” Claire said. She came into the room and went to the table to pick up the decanter of scotch. She sniffed it and made a face. “You lost track of time, did you?” she asked Joe, amused. “Are you sure you’re okay to drive, Agent Hardy?”

Ryan smiled and picked up his bag from the floor. He slipped the strap over his shoulder and hefted it. “Call me Ryan,” he said. “I think I’ll be all right, ma’am.” 

Claire smiled back at him and she was _so_ beautiful. “Call me Claire, please, Ryan.”

“All right… Claire,” Ryan said. He cleared his throat and turned his gaze back to Joe, who was watching them both with his eyes narrowed and curious. “Thank you for your help. Are you sure you don’t want your book back?”

“No, of course not. It’s been my pleasure,” Joe said. “My absolute pleasure. It’s quite exciting for me, you know. Horrible, but it’s not every day I get to help the FBI catch a killer. Though I can’t imagine how much help I’ve really been.”

“You’ve been a lot of help,” Ryan assured him. “Most of the time I just feel like I’m spinning my wheels. Things almost feel like they’re starting to make a little sense tonight.”

Joe looked pleased. “Well… any time.”

“I might take you up on that,” Ryan said. 

Claire went with them as Joe walked him to the door and stood in the foyer with her arm around her husband’s waist as he shook Ryan’s hand and they said goodbye. She looked tired and ready to slip her feet out of her high heels, but she was still lovely and Ryan felt his eyes straying to her and lingering a bit too long more than once before he finally left. He also sensed Joe noticing it, without surprise or jealousy. If anything, he seemed a little bit amused. 

At home in bed, Ryan lay awake thinking about Joe Carroll and how he had kissed him. He had brushed his teeth before lying down, but he imagined he could still taste the scotch as it had tasted between their tongues. Claire was beautiful, but Ryan was surprised to find himself wanting Joe more and willing to settle for her, even if just in his fantasies, only if he couldn’t have him. In the back of his mind, the small, muted voice of his conscience whispered to him that it was forbidden, but Ryan barely heard it before he fell asleep.


	2. II.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Header image for this part as well as blood spatter dividers made by [Portrait_of_a_Fool](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Portrait_of_a_Fool). Thank you.
> 
>  
> 
> [Please remember the warnings mentioned in chapter 1](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3852937/chapters/8602528). Things don't really get that kinky until chapter 3, but I mean it. You've been warned. Don't come crying to me about it later.

If you cut me I suppose I would bleed the colors of the evening stars.

_Owl City "The Technicolor Phase"_

Joey Matthews looked nothing like his father. He was all blond hair and pale skin covered in freckles. It was easy to see Claire in him though. He had the shape of her face and her blue eyes, but Joe’s features were--perhaps blessedly--absent. If not for the timing of Claire’s pregnancy, if Joey hadn’t already been born the first time he went to bed with her, Ryan might have wondered about the boy’s true paternity. 

“Let’s let the man do his job,” the girl, Joey’s nanny, said. 

She had big blue eyes, too, and there was nothing in her expression when she looked at him to make him think so, but Ryan got the impression he made her very uncomfortable. He dismissed the thought. A lot of people--civilians--were uncomfortable around agents. He wasn’t technically an agent anymore, but he was still standing there in a suit and tie because the FBI had brought him there. That was probably all it was. Joe Carroll had escaped from prison, murdered five people on his way out, and their world was flipped on its head. The girl _should_ be uncomfortable. 

She took Joey away to make him lunch and Ryan continued to wait. He only had to wait a minute though, then Claire came down the stairs and their eyes met and she looked so relieved to see him. She let out a breath on a sigh, like a weight had lifted away from her at the sight of him, and Ryan wondered at that. She thought--no, she _believed_ \--that he was going to fix it because he had been the one to fix it before, but Joe was still out there and Ryan still didn’t know where or how to begin finding him. There was a time when he might have known where to look, but that had been a long time ago. If Joe was being smart, he’d just disappear. 

Mason butted in then and shook Claire’s hand. Let her know who was in charge here, that it wasn’t Ryan. “I’m Agent Mason, Miss Matthews. I understand you wanted to speak to Mr. Hardy.”

Claire looked uncertainly between Mason and Ryan and Ryan almost smiled at the bewildered look on her face. Claire was picking up on Mason’s aggressive resentment of Ryan and it put her off. “Yes, but I… I need to speak with him alone, please.”

Mason smiled and shook her head. “I’m afraid that’s not possible,” she said. 

Claire’s eyebrows shot up at the patronizing way Mason was speaking to her and she said, “I’m afraid I have to insist.”

Clair exchanged a look with Ryan and barely kept from rolling her eyes as she nodded for him to go with her into the adjacent room. He went with her and Mason had to stay behind. And there wasn’t a thing Mason could do about it. 

Ryan stood with his hands in his pockets and let Claire look at him. She hadn’t seen him in eight years, but she had once come as close as anyone ever came to being _close_ to Ryan. She saw the differences, noted them, passed over the age lines and dark circles and went straight to the heart. 

“How’s your heart?” she asked. 

“The same,” he said. Which he knew was no answer at all. 

She knew it, too, but she let it pass. “But you’re drinking too much.”

Ryan dropped his eyes and ran his tongue over his teeth, tasting the lingering acid flavor of vodka on the back of his gums, and didn’t deny it. He didn’t want to talk about it. Joe seemed like a safer topic, so he changed the subject. “Have you heard from him?”

From Joe, of course. The only _him_ between them that had ever mattered. 

“Yeah, ah… A week ago, this came for me,” Claire said, holding out an envelope for him to take. “I thought you should see it.”

Ryan took the letter, unfolded it, and read it quickly. Joe’s handwriting again, Joe’s voice more present in the intimate questions--Was she fucking Ryan? Was she in love with him?--than in the brief message he had left for Ryan inside the cover of his book. Joe was rarely as succinct as he wanted to be, but he could hurt with words, use them like a weapon. They were like a knife in the heart when he really wanted them to be. The letter to Claire was meant to hurt or, at the very least, scare her. 

She looked scared. Point there for Joe. “How does he know?” 

Ryan shook his head. “He doesn’t. He’s guessing,” he said. He gave the letter back to her. His fingers felt dirty just from touching it. “And no one needs to know about this. It’s not going to help us find him.”

And it was no one’s business. It hadn’t been their business eight years earlier and it still wasn’t their business now. Even less so because now Ryan wasn’t even an agent answerable to the Bureau. He didn’t know why Claire thought he needed to see the letter at all. It was about personal stuff, stuff that was old and so far in the past, not relevant to Joe’s escape from prison or catching him. Not unless she thought Joe might come after her. 

Ryan put his hands back in his pockets and told Claire about what was going on. He told her about Jordy and Claire assumed he was Joe’s student, but Ryan wasn’t so sure. Jordy wasn’t special. He wasn’t even intelligent. It seemed more likely to Ryan that Joe had used him, had made him _feel_ special, without interest in teaching him anything. What Jordy had done to the dogs they had found in his house wasn’t Joe Carroll’s style. It was Jordy aspiring to be Joe Carroll, but Joe would never do something like that. It would have offended him. 

“Joe’s not looking for his freedom,” Claire said. 

Ryan knew that. If he knew nothing else, he would have known that. “He wants to keep killing.”

“Yeah, he’s good at it,” Claire said. She sat down on the sofa, holding the folds of her sweater tightly around herself. 

“I need to find him, Claire,” Ryan said. “And I don’t think I know how.”

He _should_ know, but he didn’t. Another time, before, when he was looking for Joe, he had tossed ideas around with _Joe_. It was ironic that, without him, Ryan didn’t have a place to start. Claire though, Claire had been married to him for years, had lived with him for years. She hadn’t known that her husband was a murderer, but Ryan didn’t hold that against her. He hadn’t known either and Joe had been right there all the time, practically rubbing the truth in his face. Joe had fooled her like he had fooled them all, but that didn’t mean she didn’t know him. 

She hesitated and looked away from him, her eyes a little wider like she might be about to cry. Ryan didn’t know what else to do, so he went over to where she was and sat down on the table in front of her. If he came at the problem another way, maybe she could tell him something he needed to know. 

“I’m sorry I didn’t call you,” he said. 

Claire shook her head. “It’s been eight years, Ryan,” she said. “I got the hint.”

And she wasn’t angry. Or she was, but she wouldn’t let him see it. If Ryan had hurt her badly, she had had ample time to deal with it and put it away. She was the one to change the subject this time. 

“The girl’s safe?” she asked. “The last victim? She’s…?”

Ryan stood up, hands back in his pockets, putting the distance back between them until he was comfortable again. “Sarah Fuller,” he said. “Uh, yeah, she’s under protection. She’s good, she’s a doctor now.”

“Well, I’m glad _someone_ was able to get beyond this,” Claire said. “I’m sure that upsets Joe.”

 _Bingo_ , Ryan thought. He didn’t let Claire see the eager surge of excitement that went through him and asked casually, “Why’s that?” 

Claire chuffed a soft, unamused sound of laughter and stood up, too. “He fancies himself Edgar Allan Poe. That was the impetus for writing his novel,” she told him. “Poe died with an unfinished manuscript, The Lighthouse, and Joe’s novel, The Gothic Sea, was sort of his way of finishing what Poe started.”

It was so simple, the way she said it like that. Joe finishing what Poe had started. Joe finishing what _he_ had started. In his mind, the difference was small. Before anything else, Joe would want to finish what he had started, which was what?

He had tried and failed to kill Ryan, but that wasn’t it. He hadn’t been there that night to kill Ryan, Ryan just got in the way. He’d been there to kill Sarah Fuller. 

But that was too simple, wasn’t it?

Perhaps it was. That didn’t make it untrue. 

“Thank you,” Ryan said. 

Claire frowned at him. “For what?”

Ryan shook his head, already on his way out of the room. “Nothing.”

**2003**

Joe wasn’t in his office when Ryan got there to meet him for lunch, so he waited inside. It was twenty minutes to the hour, and if Ryan remembered correctly, university classes usually finished around ten or fifteen minutes before or after the hour, which meant Joe would be along very soon. While he waited, Ryan read the titles on the spines of the books shelved along the walls.

Byron, Yeats, Faulkner, Dickinson, Plath, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Milton, Marvell, Keats, Blake, Browning, Coleridge, Shelley, Donne. Mostly all romantics. Mostly all long dead Englishmen. 

Ryan didn’t particularly care for poetry, especially not old poetry and love poetry. He had a soft spot for Eliot, with his dancing around the prickly pear nonsense and surrealism, but nothing like what was on Joe’s bookshelves. He didn’t touch the books and his attention soon wandered until he was standing behind Joe’s desk, looking out the window at the young people passing by. He watched them and he wondered what he was doing there. Lunch, sure, but what was he _really_ doing there?

Not thinking about lunch. He wasn’t even hungry. 

Joe walked into the room and paused for a moment when he saw Ryan. The pause was so brief that it might have meant nothing. In someone he knew better, Ryan would have interpreted it as surprise, but Joe’s face revealed nothing but confidence and satisfaction. 

“Hello, Ryan,” Joe said. He went to his desk and put his books down. There were a few messages on his desk and he looked idly through them. “I apologize for being late.”

“It’s all right,” Ryan said. “I’m, ah… not sure this is a good idea anyway.” 

Joe looked up from his desk and met Ryan’s eyes, a slow smile curving his lips. “Oh, no,” he said. His tone of voice was like one he might have used on a child that had done something very disappointing. “No, Ryan. You were doing so well.”

Ryan realized that he had drawn close to the side of Joe’s desk, closer to Joe, and took a step back. He put his hands in his pockets. “What?”

“You didn’t get angry or embarrassed at what happened last night. You were calm in the face of adversity,” Joe told him. He smiled a little, amused. He put the notes on his desk aside and straightened. “You were gracious to my wife and displayed admirable self-control. She suspected nothing. You accepted my invitation to lunch, which only further assured me that you were not at all bothered. I am not easily fooled, so bravo. You probably told yourself you’d be able to ask me more questions and talk about your case some more, which wouldn’t make it as inappropriate as all that. Then you were very brave, because here you are. But then you go and ruin it by showing your hand. Tsk, tsk, Ryan.”

Ryan stared at him, unsure what to say. Joe was right of course, and Joe might not be easily fooled, but it wasn’t often someone who knew him so little could see through Ryan like Joe had just done; like looking through a windowpane. He met Joe’s eyes unflinchingly and said, “I’m _not_ bothered.”

Joe merely continued to watch him from beneath lifted brows. 

Ryan huffed out a soft laughing sound and shook his head. “Okay, maybe a little,” he said. “It’s not what you’re thinking though.”

“You have no idea what I’m thinking,” Joe said. Which was true, Ryan didn’t. Joe’s face gave very little away. “Would you like me to tell you what I’m thinking?”

Ryan hesitated before he finally just shrugged. “It’s a free country.”

Joe smirked. “Isn’t it just?” he said. “Here’s what I think, Ryan. I think you are bothered by it, but not because I’m a man and you’re a man and you didn’t like it. I think you’re bothered by it because you did like it and because you’ve had plenty of time to think about it. Always a dangerous thing to do. How am I doing so far?”

Ryan ran a hand over the back of his neck and looked out the window past Joe’s shoulder. The way Joe saw through him made Ryan incredibly uncomfortable, but it also removed any burden on him to explain his feelings, which he was perfectly okay with. “Pretty good, actually,” he confessed. “How do you know that? You barely know me.”

“Simple,” Joe said. “You kissed me back.”

“Oh,” Ryan said. He sighed. “Shit. Now what?”

“Now?” Joe said. He smiled and walked around his desk. “Now we go to lunch and you try--unsuccessfully, I’m sure--to turn it all off for about an hour.” Joe stepped into his space before Ryan could anticipate it and move away from him. He put a hand on Ryan’s shoulder and leaned in to speak close to his ear. “I am also thinking--again--that you have the prettiest blue eyes I’ve ever seen in a human face. And that I would like to do it again, but you’ve guessed that part, I think.”

“Do what…? Oh. Yeah, I was wondering,” Ryan said. 

Joe’s smile widened. “Wondering…? If I would like to do it again?”

“If you were going to,” Ryan said, his own lips quirking in a bit of a smile.

“Oh,” Joe said. He was pleased by Ryan’s answer and when he smiled this time, Ryan again felt that strange, new little worm of desire he had experienced for the first time the night before wriggling in his belly. Even before Joe kissed him, it had been there. “Well, absolutely. Of course I will. I think, however, not here in my office in front of the window.” 

Ryan turned his head and looked, unflinching and unafraid, right into Joe’s eyes. Joe wanted to make him nervous, so he was pushing, and he read Ryan well enough that it could have easily made him uncomfortable or scared him off, but it didn’t. Everything he was doing and everything he said only made Ryan more curious. There was a mocking light in Joe’s dark eyes that he would come to recognize, that years later would still send moths dancing through his stomach; Joe was playing with him. Like a cat, he was teasing Ryan, watching him to see what he would do. 

“It’s against Bureau policy for an agent to become personally involved with a witness,” Ryan said, rising to the challenge. 

Joe’s eyes narrowed. “I haven’t witnessed anything.”

“I’ve consulted you though,” Ryan said. “You’ve seen pictures. I’ve told you things about the case. You’re too close.”

Joe blinked at him and tilted his head a little. “Not nearly as close as I’d like.”

Ryan couldn’t help it, he smiled at that. He had walked right into that one and Joe had not let it slide. “When I catch him, you may be asked to testify,” he said. “This… if it goes further, it could ruin my career. I don’t think I’m willing to do that.”

“Nor am I,” Joe said. He finally stepped back from Ryan, giving him a little space. “Which is why we should take this conversation somewhere else. I have no more classes today. We could discuss it more over some good food and a drink or two. Yes?”

Ryan thought about it. He didn’t just say no, which was the answer that sprang instantly to mind. He considered it. It was true that if Joe were called to testify later and spoke a word about anything personal between himself and one of the agents involved in the case that that agent would find himself in a world of shit. Joe had an office and he could leave it, anything that happened outside of that office or off the university premises was his business. He was unlikely to be fired for it. Ryan’s position was somewhat different. 

Did it really matter though? Did it matter and did he honestly think Joe would crow about it all to the FBI? Ryan doubted it. Joe liked to play with him and tease him and it remained to be seen how far he would go to do it, but he also didn’t seem the type to spill his own personal life all over someone else’s lap. If nothing else, it would be cheating. 

“I’ve only consulted you about the literary connection to the case anyway. Which everyone thinks I’m crazy for. I probably am and it’s probably nothing,” Ryan said. Joe just watched him, waiting for an answer. Finally, Ryan sighed and shook his head with a little smile, feeling like a fool. “Yes. All right, let’s have lunch.”

“Good,” Joe said. He turned and started for the door, forcing Ryan to follow. “I know a place. You can drive.”

They went to a café on the other side of the city. On the drive there, Joe sat calmly and looked out the window, watching people they passed. He didn’t ask Ryan about his case; it was a topic they had exhausted the previous night. Before they got to the café, Joe did turn to him with a thoughtful frown to ask him something though. 

“I’ve been wondering, Ryan. Do you think if this killer isn’t caught soon that they’ll have to close the school?”

“They might,” Ryan said. “At least until he is caught. Can’t keep dangling their students in front of the guy like carrots, can they?”

“No, I suppose not,” Joe said. He turned his attention back out the widow. “You’re so sure it’s a man. Even though you don’t know who it is.”

“Well, thing is, female serial killers are almost unheard of in modern times,” Ryan said. “He’s also white.”

Joe smiled faintly, continuing to watch out the window as they pulled in to the café. “Because his victims are white.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. He parked and looked around. “This the place?”

“Yes,” Joe said. He got out of the car.

Ryan got out and they went inside together. “Aren’t you kinda… overdressed for a place like this?”

Joe deliberately looked down at himself. He was wearing a grey three-piece suit with a black vest. He frowned at Ryan. “Am I?”

Ryan rolled his eyes and went by him into the restaurant. “Come on. I actually am getting pretty damn hungry.”

Ryan ordered a club sandwich and a beer. Joe had a glass of Chianti and the chicken. Ryan watched him flirt a little with their waitress, who was pretty in a plain sort of way and probably about sixteen. She blushed and went away smiling. Ryan just shook his head in a bemused way and sat back with his beer. 

“That wine probably came out of a box, you know that, right?” he said. 

Joe picked up the glass and tasted it. “It does taste very slightly of vinegar,” he agreed. He shrugged and ate some of his food. 

“You know, if I tried to run a game on that waitress like that, she’d get creeped out and go away thinking I was a pathetic old guy,” Ryan said. He put his beer down and took a bite of his sandwich. “You do it and, hell… I don’t know, but it’s kinda fascinating.”

“You’re not as charming as I am,” Joe said, deadpan.

“Maybe not. I don’t have that tortured, _Dead Poets Society_ thing going for me either,” Ryan said. 

Joe smiled and sat back, picking up his wine glass to drink as he looked at Ryan over the table. “Is that what it is?”

Ryan looked back at him and tipped his head back to finish his beer. He put the bottle on the edge of the table for the waitress. “No.”

“Are you sure?”

Ryan smirked. “No.”

Joe laughed. 

“So why this place of all places?” Ryan asked. 

“What, you don’t like it?” 

“Sure. It just doesn’t seem… you.”

Joe ate another bite of his chicken and put his fork down. “No, it really isn’t.”

“Then why?”

“Because there’s a motel next door,” Joe said. “Obviously.”

Ryan swallowed the food he’d been chewing and looked at Joe, who was watching him. “Obviously,” he repeated. He didn’t know what else to say. 

“Unless you’d rather not,” Joe said. 

There was Ryan’s chance, perfectly placed. The way left open for him to change his mind and stop whatever this was they were doing or working up to right there in its tracks. There was still that kiss, but if it went nowhere else, it was just a kiss. Something that Ryan, that either of them, could claim was nothing but too much to drink and a stupid impulse on Joe’s part. Ryan had taken it all with more grace than one usually expected from a man who only slept with women, but he wasn’t a bastard and he did like Joe. So he had handled it well. So what?

Joe finished his Chianti and his watchful eyes seemed to glitter, challenging him. _I dare you_ , that expression said. It was a slap in the face before ten paces, turn and fire. It was a gauntlet on the ground between them. Ryan felt that little fluttering in his stomach and looked away. Their waitress was approaching the table and she put a fresh beer on a new napkin in front of him. When she asked Joe if he would like more wine, Joe said nothing and didn’t take his eyes off of Ryan, but he put his hand over the top of the glass. 

When she was gone, Joe said, “Well?” When Ryan didn’t immediately respond, he leaned on his elbow on the table. “Ryan.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said, finally looking back at him. He nodded and stood up, leaving the beer on its napkin untouched. 

“Yeah?” Joe repeated, following him. “Yeah, yeah, _yeah what_?”

Ryan paid the check and glanced at him over his shoulder. Instead of answering him, he said, “You can pay for the room.”

Joe grinned. “How frugal of you,” he said, but he had his answer and he was pleased. He was practically beaming. 

The motel was a Motel 6. They left Ryan’s car in the parking lot at the café and walked. When they got there, Ryan stopped before going in and hesitated. Joe stood by the door, waiting, but when Ryan didn’t come along after a few minutes, he walked back to him. 

“What is it?” Joe asked him. 

Ryan stepped in against him, put a hand up to hold the back of Joe’s neck, and kissed him. Joe was caught a little by surprise and didn’t immediately respond to it, but when he did, he dropped his hands to Ryan’s hips and pulled him against him as he licked into his mouth. Ryan felt his heart skip and speed up, the butterflies in his belly coming together to coil into a knot. He had to break the kiss to catch his breath and Joe didn’t want to let him go so he had to push against his chest. He reluctantly let go and smiled to see Ryan panting. 

“What was that for?” Joe asked. 

“I had to make sure,” Ryan said. 

“And?” Joe said. “Are you sure now?”

Ryan nodded. “Positive.”

Joe studied him for a moment, looking for a lie. Even a brave one. “All right,” he said, deciding to believe him. _Positive_ was a lot more emphatic than something tame, like say _Sure_ or _Yes_ or even _You bet_. “Then let’s go get a room, Ryan.”

“Like ripping off a Band-Aid, right?” Ryan said sarcastically. 

Joe chuffed soft laughter and held the door open for him. “God, I hope not.”

They got a room and it was still early in the day, so there weren’t many cars in the parking lot--not many people in the other rooms. Ryan caught himself thinking about that and being glad of it, then dismissed it as perfectly normal. It might not be a big deal to Joe, Ryan hadn’t asked and wouldn’t know, but it was kind of a big deal to him.

Joe had the keycard, so he unlocked the door. He pushed it open and Ryan walked by him into the room, only to turn and pull Joe inside when he would have calmly closed the door behind them. He ended up slamming it shut when Ryan crowded him back against it. Joe laughed, but when Ryan kissed him, he kissed him back and didn’t protest the manhandling. On the contrary, it seemed to amuse him. 

“Easy,” Joe finally said, gently pushing him back a little. “Where’s the fire?”

Ryan stepped back to let him stand away from the door. “Sorry,” he said. “I was just thinking too much.”

“Can’t have that,” Joe said. He took off his coat and put it on the long dresser where the television sat. His vest soon followed and Joe stood there watching him as he took off his tie and began to unbutton his shirt. “Is it second thoughts?”

Ryan watched him taking his clothes off and nodded. “Second, third, fourth… yeah.”

Joe shrugged out of his shirt. “And your conclusion?”

“I’m still here, aren’t I?” Ryan said. 

Joe inclined his head. “Yes,” he said. He put a foot up on the dresser and untied his shoe, switched. “How’s the view?”

“Ah…” Ryan looked away from him and down at his own T-shirt and jeans. It was warm outside so he wasn’t wearing a coat. His jacket was in the car. He wished he had worn it just so he would have something harmless to take off. “Joe?”

“Mhmm?”

“How…? Ah… How does this work?” 

“How would you like it to work?” 

Ryan glanced up at him to see if he was joking or fucking with him to find Joe watching him seriously. He was still wearing his pants and was half-sitting on the dresser near the TV. He still had the hungry look of a cat after a mouse somewhere behind his eyes, but he wasn’t joking. 

“I don’t know,” Ryan said. 

“You’re thinking again, that’s your problem,” Joe said. He stood up from the dresser and crossed the short distance to Ryan. He dropped his hands to the fly of Ryan’s jeans and unfastened the button on top with an expert flick of his fingers. “And I believe you’ll find that you are lying if you think about it. Forget that for now. Do you have a condom? I’m afraid I don’t.”

Ryan frowned at him, then barely bit back a yelp of surprise when Joe pulled his zipper down. He backed up as he felt in his back pocket for his wallet, but Joe walked with him, depriving him of the chance to get some space between them. Ryan finally got his wallet out of his pocket and flipped it open. His FBI ID was on top, but there was a condom in one of the inside pockets. Before he could get it, Joe snatched the wallet out of his hand. 

Joe found the condom by feeling around and took it out. He showed it to Ryan and waved it a little by one corner. “So… this--I assume--being your first time at this, I’ll let you decide. Who should wear it?”

Ryan felt the bottom drop out of his stomach and his mind for a few beats, went completely blank. Then he realized that Joe was just asking him again what he was prepared for and what he wanted to happen. It might be his only chance to say it.

“I will,” Ryan said. He took the condom from Joe and Joe tossed his wallet on the dresser. “I mean… I don’t know how to do it the other way. So. So, yeah.”

“So, perhaps I’ll have to show you,” Joe said. He pulled Ryan’s shirt up until Ryan had to lift his arms for him, which he did. Joe took it off and made a pleased sound in his throat as he ran his hands up Ryan’s sides. “I’m a very good teacher, you know.”

“Yeah, I… I do know. I sat in on your class this morning,” Ryan said. 

“I know you did,” Joe said. He gave Ryan a little shove and Ryan fell backward onto the bed. “I saw you there _lurking_ in the back.”

Ryan rolled over and sat back up. When Joe raised his eyebrows at him in question, Ryan leaned over to untie his boots and take them off. He stood by the bed to take his jeans off and Joe watched him across it as his own hands went to his belt and he unfastened the buckle. 

“I was observing,” Ryan said.

Joe took his belt off and the leather slithered through his hands. “Not about to run for the door, are you?”

Ryan kicked his jeans aside and stood by the bed in his boxer briefs. He wasn’t going anywhere, but he said, “That depends on what you’re going to do with that.”

Joe smiled and snapped the folded belt in his hands once. “What would you like me to do with it?”

Ryan didn’t answer, just got back onto the bed and picked up the condom, which he had dropped. Joe sighed and put his belt aside with the rest of his clothes, then took his pants off and got up on the bed with him. 

“Maybe another time,” Joe said. 

“Another time what?” Ryan asked. “You tie me up with your belt?”

Joe grinned. “If you’d like.”

Ryan put his hand on the bed and leaned over toward him. Joe tilted his head, expecting a kiss, but instead Ryan whispered, “No, Joe.”

“You don’t mean that,” Joe said. He put his hand out and cupped the side of Ryan’s face to draw him in. 

Ryan felt his heart start racing again and licked his lips. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“Oh, yes,” Joe said. “Yes, I would.”

“Joe?”

“Hmm?”

Ryan pushed him back a little and moved to his knees. “Shut up.”

Amused, Joe lay back on the bed and looked up at him. “Of course.”

“So,” Ryan said. He slipped his underwear off and tore the condom wrapper open, not looking at Joe just yet, though he could feel Joe’s eyes on him like pins. “So. This is all pretty different, isn’t it?”

“What is?” Joe asked. He shifted on the bed and Ryan glanced up as he tossed his own underwear to the floor. “You’ve had sex before.”

Ryan snorted. “Yeah. But you’re not… you know.”

“A woman,” Joe said. 

“You’re lacking all the parts I’m familiar with, you know?” Ryan said. 

Joe laughed. “I have some they don’t as well, though I’d wager you’re still _intimately_ familiar with them. It’s not that complicated, Ryan.”

Ryan sighed and put the condom on, still with that pins and needles feeling of being watched. He flicked the wrapper away and crawled up the bed to where Joe lay with his head propped on a pillow. “All right,” he said. He dropped his head to kiss him and Joe met him halfway by leaning up. When Ryan could speak again, he said, “If I’m doing something wrong, like… I don’t know, hurting you, just tell me. Because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”

“Ryan,” Joe said with an air of extreme patience, “you’re doing that thinking too much thing again.” He ran a hand up Ryan’s arm and pulled at his shoulder. “Come on. Lay down with me.”

He did and Joe turned to him on the bed so they were face-to-face. Joe ran his hand down Ryan’s side, over his hip, and leaned in to kiss him. It was a quick kiss, it didn’t linger like the others before it. He turned his head to kiss along Ryan’s neck and Ryan could feel his pulse jumping under his mouth. So could Joe, because it made him smile. 

“This--the first--is always the hardest, but I’ll tell you something,” Joe said, his mouth by Ryan’s ear. “Like most things, it gets easier with repetition.” 

Joe was assuming it was all something that would be repeated, Ryan knew that. It was a lot for him to assume, but Ryan didn’t correct him because, honestly, he didn’t know. “If you say so.”

Joe had moved down a little on the bed, his hands moving over Ryan, around to the small of his back to pull him closer. When he caught one of his nipples between his teeth, Ryan tensed and caught his breath, but he didn’t pull away. His hands went to Joe’s head and his fingers slipped through his hair. With the nipple still held in his teeth, Joe ran his tongue over it and Ryan heard himself, as if from a distance or from the other side of a wall, make the most embarrassing moaning sound. 

Ryan tilted his head to look down at him and he could see all the way down Joe’s back. His skin was darker than Ryan’s, with a swarthy underlying shade of gold and a tan not usually seen in someone with Joe’s bookish profession. His clothes went a long way toward hiding his physique, but Joe wasn’t soft. He had solid, well-toned muscles all along his body. Ryan’s eyes followed the length of his spine and found the soft impression of dimples just above the slope of his ass. Joe might be a big fan of Poe, but he didn’t just sit around all the time grading papers either. 

It amused him that, even there in bed with the man, Ryan noticed such things and couldn’t quite turn it off. Though his thoughts at the moment ran more toward aesthetic appreciation than analysis. He found that he liked to look at the contrast between Joe’s skin and his own pressed together. He ran his fingers up from the nape of Joe’s neck through his hair and Joe made a murmuring sound that vibrated along Ryan’s skin. He shivered and clenched his hand in Joe’s hair until Joe stopped and eased back. He didn’t say anything or make Ryan let go, he just moved back up the bed to him. 

Somewhere outside their room, a door slammed.

It did cross Ryan’s mind at one point to wonder, why this man? It wasn’t that he couldn’t look at a man and appreciate that he was attractive. He could, but it was always in a detached sort of way. In the same way he might look at a well-bred horse or a pretty china doll and have no desire to fuck it. So, why was it Joe?

He didn’t know, but it was. 

Joe talked him through it a little at first. Ryan had slept with a lot of women over the years, but he actually hadn’t ever had anal sex with any of them. The first time he tried to push inside of him, Joe let him try and didn’t say anything, but when Ryan glanced up at him and huffed out a breath, he smiled. It wasn’t one of his teasing smiles. If it had been, Ryan might have quit then and there. 

“Wet your fingers,” Joe told him. 

Ryan lifted a hand and looked at his fingers, then back at Joe. “Seriously?”

“Yes,” Joe said. “Look, if you don’t want to, we can switch and you can learn it from the bottom and try again later.”

Ryan put his first two fingers in his mouth and licked them. 

Joe laughed softly and said, “You’ll like it. I promise.”

“It’s different than with a woman though,” Ryan said. He gave Joe a questioning look and Joe nodded. Ryan pressed the tip of his index finger inside him and watched his face as Joe let out a breath. “Isn’t it?”

“There wouldn’t be much point to it if it wasn’t,” Joe said. “Go on.”

Ryan pushed his finger in to the knuckle. “Now what?”

Joe sighed. “Now the other one,” he said. “Then bend them and feel.”

“For what?” Ryan asked. He pushed his second finger in and felt the way Joe’s body tightened around them, squeezing against the backs of his fingernails. “I can’t believe this ever works,” he muttered. 

Joe laughed and ran his tongue over his top teeth. “Now spread them.”

Ryan gave him a disbelieving look, but he did it. When Joe huffed out a breath and bit back a pained sound, Ryan started to withdraw his fingers.

“Don’t you dare,” Joe snapped. 

Ryan pushed his fingers back in and, remembering what Joe had said, bent them and pressed up. “Doesn’t it hurt?” 

“Only a little at first. Only for a little while,” Joe said. He gasped and rocked his hips up. “Pull them back. Not out, just back. Then in again and spread them. Keep doing that.” 

Ryan did it, watching him as he felt for whatever it was he was supposed to find with his fingertips. He knew when he found it because Joe tensed and put his hands down to clutch the coverlet between his fingers. He seemed to force himself to relax again and Ryan instantly wanted to see what would happen if he kept doing that. He found the spot with his fingers again and stroked it until Joe was making pleasured sounds low in his throat and shivering. He wasn’t out of control, not completely, but he had to remind himself to relax and Ryan could see it in his face. As he continued to move them, fucking Joe with his fingers, he could feel his muscles loosening around them. Joe had closed his eyes and wasn’t telling him what to do anymore, but Ryan wasn’t stupid, or at least he didn’t like to think so. 

This time when Ryan tried to push inside of him, it was easier. Tight, but not impossible. He pushed and felt Joe’s body open around his cock as he slowly, steadily went deeper. He didn’t even realize he was holding his breath until he let it out and felt his chest heave. He caught Joe watching him, his eyes slit and his bottom lip caught between his teeth and that, just that, with the hot gripping sensation of Joe’s body squeezing around him, sent a thrill of pleasure right to the pit of his stomach. 

Ryan moaned and Joe reached for him. He ran his hands up Ryan’s shoulders, along his neck, petting and gently pulling to make him lean down. Ryan went to him and Joe surprised him by biting him instead of kissing him. It wasn’t hard, nothing that would draw blood or bruise, but his lips would probably be swollen later. The pain didn’t annoy him or anger him, it shot through him on the heels of his pleasure and Ryan thrust against him, forcing a grunted breath from Joe. 

Joe’s breath hitched in their mouths as he finally did kiss him and Ryan slowly began to move. He put his hands on the bed by Joe’s shoulders and thrust, taking up a slow, steady pace, grinding down on the in-stroke to get Joe to make those soft, throaty sounds of pleasure he made. When he kissed him, those sounds and some of his own hummed between them, profoundly intimate like confessions and whispered secrets. They were learning each other’s bodies in ways that few other people knew them. Joe was quickly learning that Ryan didn’t mind a little pain with his pleasure, and Ryan was finding out that Joe could be more selfless than he seemed, and that he enjoyed inflicting it. He liked Joe’s fingers biting into the backs of his shoulders and the way he could feel his own muscles sliding and bunching under Joe’s hands as he moved. Joe liked to watch him, which was something Ryan had known almost from the first, so he didn’t let himself close his eyes there in the bed either, not unless he couldn’t help it. 

Ryan loved it when he could make Joe close his eyes. 

Pleasure burned deep down in his belly and Ryan sat back panting and pulled Joe with him. He held Joe’s hips as he began to move faster, following the growing urgency in his pleasure. Joe reached out and ran the flat of his hand up Ryan’s throat, fingers skating through the sweat beaded on his skin and smearing it over his chin to his mouth. Ryan’s breath puffed against Joe’s fingertips and Joe watched him as he pressed them against his mouth. Ryan licked the tips of his fingers. When Joe didn’t take his hand away, he turned his head and bit the side of his palm. Instead of taking his hand back, Joe pressed it harder to his teeth and Ryan bit down until he was in danger of breaking the skin. Joe arched off the mattress toward him with a moan, which focused Ryan’s attention amazingly. 

He licked Joe’s palm where he’d bitten him and swatted his hand away. “You liked that?” 

Joe closed his fingers around the bite like he was holding it to keep. “Don’t you?”

Ryan wasn’t sure. He didn’t know what to say because he wasn’t sure of his answer. It wasn’t something he had ever considered. “I don’t know,” he said. 

“You liked it,” Joe said. He put an arm around Ryan’s waist and pressed down on the small of his back until he leaned over him. “It’s okay to like it.”

Ryan braced one hand on the bed over Joe’s shoulder and snapped his hips into his thrusts, throwing some of his weight behind them. Joe’s fingers bit into Ryan’s back in response to the relentless pace of it. Ryan fucked him harder to shut him up and Joe liked it, he moved with it, but he held Ryan’s gaze through it with that mocking look of challenge in his eyes. 

Ryan kissed him so he wouldn’t have to see it anymore, and even the kiss became violent. Joe bit him again and Ryan bit him back. Before he knew how it had happened, there was as much teeth in the kiss as tongue and Ryan was catching his breath through his nose and mouth between licking and sucking Joe’s tongue and biting at his lips. He tasted like the cheap café Chianti over the taste that was Joe’s taste, the flavor of Joe’s mouth that Ryan was quickly becoming familiar with. Then like blood when Ryan’s teeth finally made Joe’s lip split. They were still kissing that way when Joe’s orgasm surprised him and he cried out into Ryan’s mouth. He caught the back of Ryan’s neck in his hand and held him there through it, trembling from the ends of his fingers right down his body, gasping and still kissing him, reluctant to stop. 

At last he did and lay back on the pillows, his eyes falling shut. Ryan didn’t slow his pace, but he gentled his thrusts and Joe gasped around soft moans. Sounds that would have been whimpering if they were louder. He was sore and he was tired, but he would never say so aloud because that wasn’t how the game worked. The idea made Ryan smile and Joe opened his eyes in time to catch him at it. 

Joe didn’t say anything and he didn’t smile back. He took Ryan’s hands from the bed and laced his fingers through his fingers, then he put his hands up, forcing Ryan to stretch out over him, his face close to Joe’s. Joe nipped the end of his chin and licked down his throat, pausing to lave his tongue back and forth over the pulse of Ryan’s thundering heartbeat. Ryan swallowed and he could suddenly feel his heart pounding in the back of his throat, on the back of his tongue where the taste of Joe’s mouth and blood still lingered. 

Joe turned his head and bit Ryan’s shoulder. Not gently. He bit down, teeth cutting deep, and when Ryan cried out in surprise, he sucked lightly at the spot until it was hot and throbbing. The pain of it shot down his spine even as the building pleasure twisting in his belly finally let go and spilled through him, rushing to meet it. The two sensations, which were not so different, collided. Ryan dropped his head to Joe’s shoulder as he came and moaned into his skin, muffling it against his body. 

Ryan lay there on top of him for a while and let Joe lick his shoulder, soothing the spot that was sure to be one hell of a bruise before long, if it wasn’t already. It stung as Joe’s tongue slid over it, so it might be bleeding. Ryan didn’t mind even if it was. 

“I told you so,” Joe murmured in his ear. 

Ryan didn’t move. “Mhmm.”

They were both quiet for a minute. Ryan was still waiting for his heartbeat to slow and his breath to even out. He hadn’t quite managed it yet when Joe said, “So… was it good for you?”

Ryan laughed. He pushed himself up and moved off of Joe to lie on the bed next to him. “How about lunch tomorrow?”

“Again?” Joe asked. He thought about it. “No, I don’t think so.”

Ryan sat up. He removed the condom, tied it off and dropped it into the tiny garbage can by the nightstand. “All right,” he said. “But look, I know you probably won’t, but don’t say anything, okay? I like my job.”

“Touchy,” Joe said, chiding him. He stretched on the bed behind Ryan and put a hand out to run it down his spine. “How about dinner instead? I am, after all, free every night this week.”


	3. III.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Please remember the warnings mentioned in chapter 1](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3852937/chapters/8602528). This is the last time I will mention it. If you've made it this far, I assume you've had every opportunity to figure out whether or not it will bother you and turn back.

There are two kinds of blood, the blood that flows in the veins  
and the blood that flows out of them.

_Julian Tuwim_

When they arrived at Sarah Fuller’s house, Mike Weston ignored Mason and walked over to Ryan. “It’s right this way,” he said. Then he moved out of Ryan’s way because Ryan kept walking like he wasn’t even there. 

Of course it was right that way. Ryan could see the damn house for himself.

Ryan started up the stairs and was met half-way by a man in a suit. _Cop_ , he thought instantly. “I’m Detective Warren,” he said. He put his hand out to shake and Ryan shook it briefly. 

Behind him, Mason was taking the stairs two and three at a time to catch up. The detective glanced at her, but he didn’t shake her hand and he addressed Ryan when he spoke. “Miss Fuller went to bed about an hour ago. Officer Ponds works the front door.” They followed him into the house, where more officers, these in uniform, were standing around in the living room and in the kitchen at the foot of the stairs. “Another officer here,” he said, gesturing to the men at the bottom of the stairs before he started up them. “Two men up the stairs.”

Ryan glanced around, then turned to follow Detective Warren to the second floor, but Mason crowded by him to go up the stairs behind the detective first. It was petty and stupid grandstanding, which no one was watching except for Ryan, who was not impressed. Ryan was getting really fed up with her and idly wondered if there might be a way to get rid of her. Soon would be best. 

Up the stairs, the detective was calling for the officers who were supposed to be on duty. Ryan hurried to the second floor after them and when he got there, he let the detective and Mason go looking for the cops and turned toward Sarah’s bedroom. Something was wrong and there were really only a few things that could be going wrong right about now. He ran into her room, the detective and Mason following him, and pulled back the covers on her bed. 

He saw the blood first, more red than red had any right to be, splashed on the white bed linens. But it wasn’t Sarah, it was one of the cops. _Joe_ , he thought. _It’s Joe. Joe has her now._

 _Does this hurt?_ Joe whispered in his ear. 

“She’s gone,” Ryan said. He felt helpless for a moment and turned to look around the room. “Where is she?”

_Would you like me to go deeper?_

Panicked and enraged, Ryan turned on Detective Warren. They were supposed to be watching her. He couldn’t be angry at the man laying dead in the bed, he had tried. But Warren… “Where the _hell is she_!”

Mason was somewhere in the house screaming that an officer was down. Idiot girl, it was too late for him. Her priorities were all wrong. 

“I don’t know,” Warren said. He backed away from Ryan, arms spread helplessly to his sides. “I don’t _know_!”

“How did she get out of here?!” Ryan demanded, but he had already dismissed the detective from his thoughts as he turned to look for a way. He smelled blood, but it was probably the dead cop in the bed. There was a lot of it. 

Mason was still babbling about the officer, about him being down, and in the back of his mind where Ryan wasn’t thinking about Sarah and Joe and what Joe could be doing--was probably doing--to her as they dicked around, he was also thinking about slamming Mason’s head against the bedroom wall to make her shut the fuck up. Maybe he could make a trade with Joe. Jennifer Mason for Sarah Fuller. Probably not. Mason had that ugly dark mole on her face and Joe did like his beauties. 

There was blood spatter on the floor. Might be the cop’s, but it lead into the closet. If it were spatter from the officer’s cut throat, the pattern would have matched one on the closet doors, but there wasn’t any. The doors were clean and white. _Because it’s Sarah’s blood_ , Ryan thought as he yanked open the doors.

There was more blood on the floor in the closet, mashed into the pale carpet under feet. It concentrated around the area under Sarah’s clothes. There was a handprint on the wall that was too small to be a man’s. 

They had taken her through the wall and that was clever. Even as Ryan pushed Sarah’s clothes out of the way to find the hole the two supposedly gay neighbors had cut in her closet wall to get to her without anyone knowing, he admired their cunning. ‘Cunning,’ a word found in the Old Testament used to describe the treacherous serpent in the garden, later the origin of the word ‘cunt.’ Joe had told him that one morning over coffee at Ryan’s dining table. Their plan was _cunning_ , but it hadn’t been designed by the gay neighbors; it was all Joe Carroll. Ryan didn’t even know the rest of it and he knew that. 

He put the cut-out slab of sheetrock aside and, while the other officers went around to the neighbors’ apartment, Mason passed Ryan a flashlight and followed him through the wall. She had the gun, so she should have took the lead, but Ryan didn’t let her until they were out of the closet on the other side. Then he stood back with the flashlight and scanned the bedroom so she could see what she was aiming at. She needn’t have bothered; they were gone. Empty places had their own sounds, or lack of them. An empty place had a way of feeling empty that others didn’t and this one was empty. If they found anything, they would find a body, but that didn’t seem like Joe’s style. He would want this one for himself. 

Still, they went room to room and searched. Ryan noticed something off about the pictures on the walls and it took him a minute to figure out what it was; there were too many. Too many big, professional quality photographs of the two men together. Hugging. Smiling. Gazing adoringly at each other. That same theme repeated in front of at least twenty different backdrops. _See how much we love each other? See how happy we are together? How harmlessly gay we are?_ It was the photographic equivalent of writing names inside a heart on your notebook in the third grade. Genuine couples didn’t do that. There might be one or two photographs like these for special occasions. Weddings. Family photographs for a Christmas card. School photos of the kids. Maybe an anniversary if it was special. No one packed a photographer with them to the beach on an ordinary Saturday. 

Sarah Fuller wouldn’t have noticed it. If she did, she probably thought it was sweet, how in love they were. 

They followed the blood through the bedroom and down the stairs, this time with Ryan leading the way again. Water dripped from the spout in the sink, making a slow, measured tinkling sound that echoed in the silence of the apartment. The blue and red lights from the patrol cars outside flashed in the windows, the only light in the room other than the dull glow of a digital clock and the beam of Ryan’s flashlight. The men had hit the breakers before they left, probably thinking that it would take law enforcement longer to search a dark apartment than a lighted one. They were right, too. It was all just a waste of time and Ryan could feel it, every moment they stayed in the apartment flying by, one less moment left in Sarah Fuller’s life, one less moment they had to save her. 

They still had to search it. There was nothing else to be done. 

In the living room, there were more pictures of the neighbors striking amorous poses for the camera. Ryan shined the flashlight on a photograph that sat on a shelf and narrowed his eyes as he studied the two men in the picture. One of them was smiling, perhaps even laughing, but the other, with his arms possessively around him, stared out of the photograph with all the warmth and humanity of a viper. There was something about this picture, something that tickled at Ryan’s problem solving predatory instincts, something… 

There was a crash behind him and Ryan whipped around. Agent Reilly, followed by Detective Warren and the young Agent Weston, came through the door and up the short flight of steps to the main room where they were. Their own flashlights added a bit more illumination to the room and they spotted more blood on the floor. More stairs, leading down. Always down. 

Ryan followed the blood and the others followed him. It led them to the car garage. When Ryan passed through the door, his light fell on the blood first. Blood, thick and nearly purple in the dull light of the flashlight, dripping like the water dripping in the sink upstairs from the tips of fingers. Cop fingers. The other officer stationed outside Sarah Fuller’s room. The blood dripped sluggish and slow, into a puddle around the man, who sat limp and dead in a chair. 

Ryan sighed, his stomach churning with disgust. “Get the lights,” he said. When no one immediately moved to obey him, when the beams of light pointed at the dead officer did not even waver, he raised his voice and snapped, “ _Get the lights._ ”

Weston found the switch to open the garage door instead of trying to find the fuse box in the dark. The door rolled up, letting in the light from patrol car headlights parked just outside, the orbiting red and blue flashes, the prying eyes of all the officers and marshals just outside, waiting to hear what had happened. What to do next. How badly they had fucked up. 

“Hardy,” Mason said.

She was looking at something behind him on the wall. Ryan turned slowly, reluctantly, to read the message in blood on the wall. 

**NEVERMORE**

He dropped his head, a sudden feeling of helpless exhaustion washing over him. It was happening again. All over again. All the death, all the killing, all of it right in his face where he couldn’t escape it and he-- _he_ \--was being called upon to stop it. Again. Hunt Joe, face the death--or Death, whichever--again. The death in his face everywhere he looked. The blood. The loss. Again and again the loss. Worst of all was Joe. Whether they found the girl in time or not, he would have to face Joe, look into his glittering eyes again, watch that darkness there sliding behind them like a parasitic worm, and see himself reflected in the shine of his pupils. Not as he _wanted_ to be seen, not as he _pretended_ to be, but as he _was_. 

This one, the cop sitting dead in the chair in his cop uniform with his shiny cop badge and his little cop radio on his shoulder, he didn’t mean anything to Ryan. He wasn’t important. Sarah Fuller though, she was his only saving grace. She had saved him by living as much as Ryan had saved her from dying, and now Joe had her again and Ryan didn’t need any cryptic message in blood on the wall to know what he would do with her. 

The same thing he had tried to do with her ten years before. He would kill her. Not, as Claire had suggested, to finish what he had started. He was going to kill her because Ryan had taken her away from him, saved her from him, shot him and had him imprisoned, waiting to die. Because Joe knew about his death curse, how everyone always died on him or died for him or just died while he was somewhere else. Ryan could never save anyone and it tormented him and, with only a few little twists and turns, a little more here, a little off the top, and Ryan _was_ Joe. He wasn’t so different and Joe was really the only person in the world who knew it. There was no better way to torture Ryan when he couldn’t physically touch him than to twist the knife into his brain, into his heart, into the very core of him where Ryan punished himself for the good man he couldn’t be every single day. 

He would kill Sarah just to add her to Ryan’s list of the dead.

Ryan turned and walked out of the garage, into the bright headlights of a government vehicle, his gaze faraway as he looked right through them, not seeing the cars or the people or even the street they were on. Sarah Fuller was gone and he didn’t know where. Joe was gone, free again. Ryan didn’t know if he could save her this time. He didn’t even know where to begin looking.

He could feel his own mind closing in on him like a dark hallway. 

_Does this hurt?_

“Not yet,” Ryan muttered under his breath. 

He was sitting against the hood of a black SUV while the marshals and detectives searched the house for anything that could tell them anything. There were blue and red lights flashing in the corners of his eyes. He felt he should be doing something, but there was nothing for him to do. It was a feeling that always made him want to run. It was how he usually fell into the bottle when he fell the hardest. 

_Would you like me to go deeper?_

Ryan ran a hand through his hair and tilted his head back. Above him somewhere there were stars, but in the obscuring city light he couldn’t see them. Somewhere, that darkness glittered and shined. 

“Yes,” Ryan said honestly. He lightly rubbed his chest where the scar over his pacemaker rested. “Yes, I would.”

“What did you say?” Mason asked him. 

Ryan didn’t look at her. “Nothing. I wasn’t talking to you.”

Mason stared at him for a moment, looked like she wanted to say something else, then turned and walked away. Marshal Turner walked over to her, a pen in one hand and a little notebook in the other. He read from it as he spoke to her and told her that the gay neighbors had left forty minutes earlier.

“No one thought to search the vehicle?” Ryan asked.

They all looked at him with similar little moues of resentment on their federal agent faces. Ryan raised his eyebrows and waited for Turner to answer him. 

“There was no reason to check,” Turner said. “She wasn’t missing.”

The neighbors should never have been an issue. Sarah Fuller should have been moved into protective custody as soon as Joe Carroll escaped. These were things they all knew. Things he didn’t have to say aloud. They all watched him like they expected him to say them anyway and Ryan was tempted to do it if only to make himself feel a little better. 

“…second grade. Billy Thomas is a computer tech,” Weston was saying when Ryan tuned in to listen. “He runs the fraud division of a regional bank.”

Unsurprised and unimpressed, Ryan said, “And I bet they weren’t gay either. Carroll placed them here to watch over her until he was ready.”

“Come on. They’ve been her neighbors for three years,” Agent Riley said.

“She’d never suspect them,” Ryan said, pacing away from them, “and now they’ve taken her straight to Carroll.”

They were all staring at him again, but now their expressions had given way to disbelief and alarm. Ryan walked by them back to the open door of the garage. 

“He’s finding people to help him do it… on the damn internet,” Ryan said. He could see it, how it had worked, how Joe had _made_ it work. It was all seduction. All of it. The same principals applied. “It… It’s like they’re his… followers.”

Turner was talking again but he was so much white noise buzzing in the background. He didn’t believe--or didn’t want to believe--what Ryan was saying. It didn’t matter. Ryan hardly believed it, but as he said it, as it fell out of his mouth, he knew it was true. 

“The prison guard worships him,” Ryan said, the pieces falling into place like checkers through a shoot, “ice pick lady’s brainwashed to kill herself. These two guys have dedicated _years_ of their lives to him. There’s some kind of fanatical obsession in play here, it’s like it’s a cult, it’s--”

_**NEVERMORE** _

Like graffiti artists tagging the sides of train cars to take their names across the country. _Let it be seen_ , those messages said. _Let it be seen by the world and read even if it isn’t understood_. Joe’s book, his shitty book, all meant to demonstrate his love and appreciation of the incomplete work of one long-dead writer. Poe. Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s raven at the door declaring over and over _nevermore_ , without understanding, without knowledge of its meaning, just saying it to say it, but spreading the message of fear into the heart of man even so. 

“Nevermore,” Ryan said. “The Raven. Poe is symbolizing the finality of death.” They all just stared at him. All they did was _stare_ and do nothing. He might be speaking in tongues for all it seemed to spark anything inside them. “Have you pulled the GPS?” he asked Turner. 

Turner stared at him and didn’t reply. Like he was waiting. 

Ryan wanted to hit him, but he didn’t. It would waste precious time. “Where are the satellites?!”

“I knew you’d show up eventually,” Turner said smugly. 

“Do _something_!” Ryan shouted at him. He was talking again, but Ryan shouted over him, not interested in whatever he had to say. It would make Turner happy to force Ryan to lose his temper, but that wouldn’t save Sarah or anyone. Ryan could still feel it happening. “How many checkpoints have you set up?! Don’t just stand there! _Move_!”

Mason put herself between Ryan and Turner and put her hands up to block him like she thought Ryan would jump on the man at any moment. Ryan pushed by her and crossed the yard, taking deep breaths, trying to calm down. He couldn’t believe this was happening. No, wait. He could believe _this_ was happening, incredible as it all was, it was that they did _nothing_. He couldn’t understand that. Sure, he didn’t know where to begin looking for Joe, but they were the FBI and they had resources that he did not. They had cameras on satellites over the earth that could look through his bedroom window and check the thread count on his pillowcase. If they couldn’t do anything to find Sarah Fuller before Joe got his hands on her, she would be gone. Standing there debating the sexuality of the fake neighbors was not getting them one step closer to finding her. Not one moment closer to putting Joe back into the prison where he belonged. 

Ryan picked up a plastic lawn chair and threw it. It bounced off the side of the brick building and suddenly Ryan had to stop. He had to bend over and breathe because his heart had skipped. It was a small, tickling, lurching sensation in his chest, like an elevator taking a short five-floor drop. A knackered lift; that was what Joe would have called it. Thanks to him, Ryan’s heart was a knackered lift. 

He stood against a streetlight pole while everything settled and went back to normal. He didn’t want to stand there, to kill more time, but his heart was what it was now and he had to take care of that. Even if Sarah died while he was standing there, he would have to stand there, because he wasn’t going to let himself die until he’d caught up with Joe again one last time. 

When it had stopped pounding like it was going to fly out of his chest, Ryan pushed away from the light pole and went back into the apartment. His anger was still there. It was always there somewhere. He had let the door where he kept it locked away crack open just a little, but it was closed again. Stirring, sure. Grumbling and growling to be set free, but locked up tight. 

The first thing his eyes fell on was the picture of the men he had noticed before. There was still something wrong with it, but he still didn’t know what it was. 

He caught Weston as he was passing through to ask him what he had on the men.

“Nothing, except for some property records in Lake Whitehurst,” Weston said. He studied Ryan’s face for a little while. His expression was almost pitying. 

Ryan watched him walk away without much surprise. He was to be pitied now, perhaps watched in case of an irrational outburst. Turner was undoubtedly thrilled. 

He slid his eyes back to the picture on the shelf. The sign behind the two men embracing was for a place called The Lighthouse Bed and Breakfast. The address across the bottom of the sign was concealed behind them, but over the shoulder of the man with the predator’s eyes was the word ‘Whitehurst.’ The sign looked old. Maybe it had been weathered to appear old, to appear vintage, but if this was Joe, and it was, then that was unlikely. Joe had always liked abandoned places. Abandoned buildings. Unfinished endings. 

Claire’s voice rang over and over, an echo down his dark hallway mind, “ _Poe died with an unfinished manuscript,_ The Lighthouse, _and Joe’s novel,_ The Gothic Sea, _was sort of his way of finishing what Poe started._ ” Ryan took out his phone and did a search for the bed and breakfast in Lake Whitehurst. The property records were for a place in Lake Whitehurst, something that the FBI currently considered to be _nothing_ , but that was it. That was where she was. 

Ryan got the address and started for the door. That was where she was and that was where Joe was and that was where Ryan would see him again.

**2003**

After the first time in the Motel 6, they never paid for a room again. They met in condemned ones though. Condemned and abandoned motels, hotels, houses, warehouses. One time in an old textiles factory. Another time in a four-story mansion where they had to be careful when the stairs creaked that they didn’t go through them. Joe had a strange affinity for abandoned places and an uncanny ability to find them whenever they needed somewhere to go. 

It wasn’t Joe’s way of being frugal. If that were all it was, there were times when they could have met at Ryan’s place or gone to Joe’s house. Sometimes Claire went away. She stayed a weekend with her parents. She went out of town to a conference. Or Ryan would have let Joe stay with him, for just an hour or overnight, as long as he wanted. He was an extremely private man, everyone knew that, but after the second or third time Joe made him come while he was bleeding, even Ryan didn’t see much point in pretending there were any secrets he had that he wouldn’t tell him, or wounds he wouldn’t open to let him peek inside. It wasn’t about money and it wasn’t because they didn’t dare do it at home, it was because the kind of sex Joe liked best, the kind of sex he quickly turned Ryan on to, wasn’t the kind of sex anyone did in silence if they were doing it right. It was hard to explain that much blood on the sheets to the wife when she saw the laundry. 

At first it was only biting and scratches. The scratches left welts down Ryan’s back but didn’t break the skin. When he bit him, Joe was less careful. The bites left bruises with a livid suck mark in the center like the eye of a rosette, but when Ryan never made him stop, when his body thrummed with pleasure at the pain, Joe bit down until it bled. Ryan could have taken a cast of Joe’s teeth from some of the wounds he left on his chest and shoulders. He liked it that much and Joe loved how much he liked it. He pushed him to find a line over which Ryan would not let him cross and it never got far before Ryan was pushing him back. 

“We need a word,” Joe said. 

They were in an old building that had once been a slaughterhouse for worn-out, used up and injured horses. The men who did such work were called knackers, Joe had told Ryan on the way there. The horses they killed for glue and hides were slaughtered on site and stacked in the back of trucks to be taken away. Those to be made into pet food were hauled away standing and killed just before they were turned into processed meat. It was strange, Joe had mused, how words in the English language could have so many dissimilar meanings. He then lit a small cigar, the kind called a cigarillo, and was quiet until Ryan pulled the car up in front of the closed slaughterhouse gate. 

“Ryan,” Joe said when Ryan didn’t answer him. “We need a word. Or a phrase.”

Ryan stood in the middle of the slaughterhouse floor with his arms above his head and looked at Joe with lazy indifference. Joe had bound his wrists together with handcuffs Ryan had given him and hooked the short chain over a meat hook that hung from the ceiling, at the right height to keep Ryan’s entire body straight and tense and the handcuffs from coming off the hook before he wanted to take him down. 

It was nearly dark in the building and there were no windows. They had brought a gas lamp and Joe lit the flame and held it up beside Ryan’s head to look into his face. Ryan lifted his eyebrows at him.

“Well?” Joe said. 

“You’re the writer,” Ryan said. “For that matter, you’re the English teacher. You’re the words man, Joe. What do we need a word for anyway?”

“So we don’t get carried away,” Joe said. “A safeguard. Something to keep you… us… safe. I’ve just been thinking… it might be important.”

“You mean a safety word?” Ryan asked. He had come across such things sometimes in his line of work, but he had never entertained the idea that he might _need_ one. “Like… if I want you to stop?”

“Yes, exactly. A _safety_ word,” Joe said. He put the lamp down and the shadows shifted along the walls and the floor. As he paced before Ryan, he unfastened his belt and wound it around his closed hand as he pulled it from the belt loops. “I think it’s a good idea to have one. I wouldn’t want to kill you. Not by accident, anyway.”

Ryan thought about it for a minute. He watched Joe’s hands flex tight around the leather of his belt. Joe put it down for now beside the gas lamp and unbuttoned his shirt. He wasn’t wearing a suit today and he had left his frumpy cardigan sweater in the car. He looked much better without it and Ryan had told him so before, but Joe knew it and still liked them. Ryan thought they made him look about ten or fifteen pounds heavier than he was and soft, when really underneath he was slim and fine. He watched Joe take his shirt off and looked up to catch Joe’s dark eyes shining at him in the muted yellow lamplight. 

“I surrender,” Ryan said. 

Joe looked at him sharply and tossed his shirt over the rotting timber of a stall beside the crate where he had put the lamp down. He picked up his belt and let it drop, buckle down, uncoiling it. “You do, hmm?” he said. “Already?”

Ryan licked his bottom lip and swallowed. He watched Joe move, going around him now, watching his face, and Ryan closed and unclosed his hands into fists above his head. The yellow light slid into the dips and valleys of Joe’s body where he wanted very badly to lay his hands. There was a scar, a small blurred shape like a mutilated smiley face, on the left side of Joe’s chest. It was over his collarbone, a short finger-walk away from the hollow of his throat. Someone else had made it long ago with the heated metal top of a disposable cigarette lighter. He hadn’t gotten up the nerve yet, but Ryan kept promising himself that one day soon he would burn or cut that scar, that brand, off. He’d replace it with something of his own.

“Ryan,” Joe said to get his attention. He smiled when Ryan lifted his gaze to meet his eyes. “Did you say you want to surrender?”

“Huh?” Ryan said. He blinked and shook his head. “What are you talking about? And _why_ are we talking right now?”

“Because I said we need a word. To keep us safe, you know. So we don’t _kill_ each other,” Joe said. He folded his belt in two and lightly slapped it against his hand. “And you said, and I quote, ‘I surrender.’ So, you see…”

“I meant that’s the word,” Ryan said. “The phrase. Whatever. I know I won’t say it unless I really want you to stop. How about you?”

Joe stopped pacing and stood in front of him, head tilted a little to one side as he considered it. “Fine. Good. That’s good,” he decided. “I like that. I do. I wouldn’t say that either. It’s perfect.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. And it kind of was. It was fitting in a way that _clicked_ into place like tumblers in a lock. “So, that’s taken care of. So… Joe?”

Joe smiled and ran the looped end of his belt down Ryan’s chest, over his stomach. He paused with it resting against Ryan’s groin and leaned in to kiss him. “I think the pants should go, too. What do you think?”

“Ah… We’re in a barn. Maybe wait on that part?” Ryan said. 

“All right… Keep the pants, but the trousers definitely have to go,” Joe said. He unfastened the fly of Ryan’s jeans, but then he left them on and walked around him again. 

Ryan tried to turn his head to look for him over his shoulder, but with his arms over his head the way they were, he couldn’t. “What’s the difference?”

“The difference is pants and trousers,” Joe said. “Don’t be annoying, Ryan.”

“Joe, come _on_ ,” Ryan said. He understood it was all a game with Joe and fine, that was fine, but at this rate his arms were going to fall asleep and start to tingle before he shut up and got to business. 

“What? You don’t find playful banter to be stimulating?” Joe asked. He lightly tapped his belt against the back of Ryan’s shoulder and moved up against his back to nuzzle the back of his neck. Ryan shivered at the warmth of his breath along his skin and Joe grinned. “Ah, I see that you _do_ , in fact.”

Ryan made a sound of frustration in his throat. Joe ran his hands down his sides. He still held the belt in the left one and the leather slithered over Ryan’s skin with the calluses on Joe’s fingertips. Ryan’s shivering intensified, became trembling. It was still part frustration, but mostly arousal now. He could smell Joe, the lingering scent of expensive tobacco and whiskey, the acids in brittle old paper, and the faint odor of light perspiration. He could feel the heat of his body just out of reach, not touching him, but close enough to him that a deeply indrawn breath would bring them together. The handcuff chains rattled against the metal meat hook as Ryan instinctively tried to reach for him.

Joe laughed softly and hooked his fingers in the waist of Ryan’s jeans to pull them down. He dragged them down his thighs before he let go and let them drop. “Step out of them,” he told Ryan. He did and Joe kicked them away. “Do you know,” Joe said, pacing away from him, “I’m very angry with you, Ryan.”

Ryan frowned at that and tried to think what the hell he could have done to make Joe, who was probably one of the calmest, _chillest_ people he had ever known, angry. Oddly, the idea didn’t concern him so much as turn him on. It would be interesting to see what Joe would do when he was genuinely angry. “No, I didn’t know that,” he said. “Why?”

“Those bruises on my throat, do you remember?” Joe said. “Close your eyes and think really _hard_ if you don’t. Remember? Your hands on the sides of my neck and you squeezed, do you remember now?”

That had been two days ago and the yellowing bruises were still there, of course he remembered. That time had been in Ryan’s bed and he remembered it _very_ well. It was still the middle of the day, about three o’clock, and the sun came through the windows and Joe was under him and sweating, his back sticking to the sheets, when his sweat caught the light and it sparkled every time Ryan thrust and Joe moved. His hands had gone to Joe’s neck intending to pet, but he’d closed his fingers around his throat instead, squeezed, and Joe stared up into his eyes and dared him to keep squeezing. 

“You didn’t stop me,” Ryan said. “Your hands weren’t tied. You could have stopped me if you wanted me to stop.”

“Ah, _yes_ ,” Joe said. “But just now… for just a moment, didn’t you feel a little guilty about it?”

“No,” Ryan said. “Joe, come on. I want--”

“Ah-ah,” Joe said. “There’s a point to this, which I’ll get to directly. First though, you’re right. But just a taste.”

Before Ryan understood what he was talking about and was ready for it, the belt snapped out and hit him across the back. The leather stung and Joe could hit hard, but he hit him with the flat of the belt and it hurt more because Ryan was unprepared for it than because the blow was all that powerful. Still, he hissed in a breath through his teeth and started shaking again. Anticipation was driving him crazy. 

“Right, back to my point,” Joe said. “I believe Claire suspects me of infidelity. She saw your fingerprints. There and…” He stepped up behind Ryan again and nipped his earlobe lightly. “And on my thighs… my hips… my wrists. You’re quite rough with me, Ryan.”

Ryan had similar bruises from Joe’s fingers all over his own body, but he didn’t point that out to him. Joe was well aware of it. “You like it,” he said softly. He laughed a little, but it turned into a throaty moan of frustrated arousal and he pulled a bit against the handcuffs. “She doesn’t know anything. Not unless you’re fucking her again, huh?”

“Would it upset you to know that I am?” Joe asked him. He sounded amused, probably because Ryan had phrased the question so crudely. 

“No,” Ryan said. Except that was a lie, he realized. It might upset him a little, he just didn’t have the right. “She’s your wife. I’m just some guy.”

“Hmm, well. Well, yes and no, but as it happens, I’m not,” Joe said. “She’s not difficult to put off with the right excuses, _but_ she does still see a lot of me. So… she saw your bruises all over me and of course they’re not her own. Claire’s a gentle soul, unlike yourself, Ryan. But you’ll love this--She thinks you’re a woman.”

Ryan didn’t care if Claire thought he was a two-headed zebra. He was tired of Joe’s teasing and frustrated almost beyond endurance. “Joe, _please_.”

“Please what?”

“Please shut up.”

Joe snorted laughter and bright pain shot up Ryan’s back as he snapped the belt against him again. “How _rude_.”

That time it was hard and Ryan caught his breath. When he let it out, the sting had subsided into a low, hot feeling. “Quit playing games, Joe. Just do it.”

Joe scoffed. “It’s the only game _worth_ playing with you, Ryan. Besides, I was sharing my concern. Everything isn’t about sex.”

“No,” Ryan said with a huffed breath, “but _this_ is. Can we _not_ talk about your wife right now?”

“I thought you liked my wife.”

“ _Joe_.”

Joe laughed, the sound sharp in the silence and darkness around the single little flame. He walked over to where Ryan hung and pressed a kiss into the back of his shoulder. He bit lightly there where the muscle was bunched and licked the spot, still smiling and amused. “Are you ready to surrender yet?” he murmured. 

“Not hardly,” Ryan said. “I think you can do better.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’re right,” Joe said. “Let’s find out, shall we?”

The belt lashed out and hit Ryan across the back. Joe hit him with the tongue end of the belt, turned so it was flat when it smacked him, but it still stung. He paused after that first blow, gauging Ryan’s reaction to it, but then he began to hit him over and over without stopping. He lashed Ryan’s back with the belt in a crisscross motion, over handed from right to left, left to right so that the blows fell without pause. Joe was strong and he didn’t hold back, he hit him as hard as he could and the repeated, continuous lashes when they started were only a little painful, but that pain grew and grew as the belt fell again and again over the same skin in the same places. Ryan’s back grew hot with it until every time Joe hit him it was like being struck by lightning.

Ryan clenched his teeth together to keep himself from crying out in pain and bowed his head, his eyes closed and the shadows cast by Joe’s arm falling rhythmically over and over dancing in the yellow light of the lamp on the backs of his eyelids. His breath was hard and panting, constricted in his chest because he wouldn’t let his lips part for fear of screaming. His heart beat like a drum in his temples and tasted salty and thick on the back of his tongue. Joe was breathing hard, too. Whipping somebody the way he was whipping Ryan was tiring. His own panting breaths were in Ryan’s ears with his own until he couldn’t differentiate the two. They were the same. If Joe were pressed against him, Ryan knew his heart would be pounding, keeping time with his. 

The pain eventually melted into one hot, throbbing, constant sensation. It tingled and burned, but it was almost soothing. It washed through him like salt water.

Joe cursed and suddenly stopped. When he did, the numbness fell away and Ryan really _felt_ the pain. All of it, that hot pain in the cold night air. He was shivering enough that the chain of his cuffs rattled on the hook and his arms were shaking, his whole body vibrating with tension. He gasped and tossed his head, his hair wet with sweat and sticking to his face, sweat sliding toward his eyes to burn in the corners and coat his lashes. 

“Why’d you stop,” he asked. His voice was soft, but it cracked and shook. “Joe?”

“Well, you’re bleeding,” Joe said, annoyed. He was breathing hard through his nose. “I didn’t think you would. Not yet.”

He stood close behind Ryan and put his hand flat to Ryan’s back. It was only when he touched him that Ryan felt the cold slide of blood down his spine in contrast to the hot sting of the salt in Joe’s skin on those open, bleeding welts. He jerked and twitched at the pain, but when Joe took his hand away, he moaned in protest to have it back. 

“You should see your back,” Joe murmured. His breathing had evened out again. “It’s lovely.”

“Don’t. Don’t stop,” Ryan said, panting it.

“No,” Joe said. “I’m not done yet. Unless, that is, you would like to surrender.”

“No,” Ryan said. “No. I wouldn’t. Don’t stop.”

Without another word, Joe turned the belt over in his hand, stepped back again, and hit him with the buckle end. The blow surprised Ryan, drove his breath out in a rush and, on the next one that quickly followed, he screamed. 

“Is it too much?” Joe asked him. 

“ _No_ ,” Ryan shouted. “God, no. Joe, don’t. _Don’t stop_.”

In response, Joe hit him again, taking up the same crisscrossing rhythm as before, and pain rocked through Ryan’s body in bursts like gunshots. He arched his back when it became too intense, nearly too much, but he wouldn’t say the words that would make Joe stop and Joe didn’t. The sound of the small steel buckle at the end of the leather strap hitting his flesh was like the sound of fists. The buckle had edges and Joe hit him with it as hard as he had hit him with the softer end and it cut his skin. It split his skin open so that after awhile, the blood wasn’t sliding down his back in tickling cold trickles; it sprayed from his back in misty spatter every time the buckle landed, it ran down his shoulders, soaked his under shorts, ran down the backs of his thighs. 

The tingling, burning numbness had returned, though Ryan no longer endured it silently. His cries and screams and indrawn breaths echoed in the vast, empty space of the slaughterhouse. He had gone limp and hung from the hook by his cuffs. He knew he was shaking violently only because his vision was unsteady from the vibration of his quaking body. 

Ryan was standing in dirt and straw that had turned to clay under his feet in his own blood when Joe stopped hitting him again. Ryan didn’t protest it that time. He had his eyes closed again, his thoughts nothing but rioting bright, sunny warm colors; yellow, white, red. 

Joe stood over him and cupped a hand under Ryan’s chin to tilt his head up, turn it to look at him. He pressed his body against Ryan’s back and Ryan grunted softly in pain at the contact of Joe’s sweaty skin on his. It was like being set aflame.

The belt, now wet with Ryan’s blood, slid up his throat to his chin and Joe used it to hold his head up when Ryan would have let it drop. “You’re black and blue,” Joe murmured. “Mostly black. A little red. You’re bleeding, can’t you smell it?”

Ryan could not. He was still gasping and could not spare his senses from all the pain to smell anything. 

“It’s split open,” Joe said. “It’s going to scar. Perhaps badly. Ryan?”

“Hmm?” Ryan managed. 

“Say it,” Joe whispered. “Say it. You want me to stop, don’t you? Say the words. Say, ‘I surrender,’ hmm? Come on. Say it and it can stop.”

Ryan rolled his eyes up to look at him. They were clouded, a little faraway and dreamy, feverish. They cleared as he turned his head to kiss the inside of Joe’s forearm where it lay against his chest. Joe had some of his blood on his hands from the wet leather belt and it was tacky on Ryan’s neck under Joe’s fingers, but his arm was dry and clean. Ryan watched his face, the ravenous hunger that flashed in Joe’s eyes, and said nothing as he pressed soft kisses to his arm. He closed his eyes after a minute and rested his head against that arm. 

He didn’t say the words. 

“Would you still love me if I killed you, Ryan?” Joe asked. 

Ryan didn’t tense, didn’t recoil, he didn’t open his eyes or bother with denials or protestations. He smiled faintly and said, “Yes.”

Joe flung the bloody belt aside and reached over Ryan’s head to take him down from the hook. He had to force Ryan to his feet to get some slack in the handcuff chain. Once the chain came off the meat hook, Ryan slumped and Joe had to catch him around the waist and hold him up or he would have collapsed on the dirt and sod floor. Ryan was slow to respond when Joe kissed him. Sluggish, his head full of cotton and bright colors. One of Joe’s hands was on his face, petting his sweaty hair back as he kissed him deeply, licking, sucking, no biting now. His other hand was on Ryan’s lower back and it burned like a match touched to gasoline. Joe fumbled with the key to the handcuffs, cursing when his bloody fingers slipped on it until he finally got it into the hole and turned it.

The floor was hard and gritty under their knees, packed down by the feet of a hundred thousand dead horses. Joe knelt with him on the floor and Ryan was too worn-out and lax to resist him, so when Joe turned him to face away from him and made him put his hands out on one of the dry rotted boards of an animal stall, he let him move him where he wanted him to go. He held onto the dry wood, but he slumped back against Joe. He would have slumped all the way to the floor if he hadn’t been there. 

“I’d rather look into your eyes while I’m doing this,” Joe said roughly. “Unfortunately… we got a little too carried away to allow for that here.”

Ryan frowned and laid his head back on Joe’s shoulder. “What are you talking about?”

Instead of answering him, Joe eased Ryan up on his knees so he could get a hand to his fly and work it down. Next, he hooked his fingers in the elastic waist of Ryan’s blood-sticky underwear and pulled them down his thighs. 

Ryan realized the answer to his own question and chuffed soft, tired laughter. “Really? I mean… you want to fuck _now_?”

“Yes. Christ, yes, I do.” Joe kissed the top of Ryan’s shoulder as he pushed his pants down. “I’ll be gentle. I’ll go slow.”

“You promise it won’t hurt, I suppose,” Ryan said dryly. He let go of the rotting wood board with one hand to reach back and run it up Joe’s thigh to his hip and pull. Joe rocked forward against him and Ryan rolled his hips back into the motion. “Come on then, do it.”

Joe got his hand between them and pushed two fingers up his ass. Ryan spread his knees wide without being asked and Joe moved between them, his own legs under Ryan, holding him in place. When Ryan’s underwear got in his way, he stopped fingering him long enough to rip them and push them down again. When Joe slipped his fingers back inside him, Ryan knew his blood was on them. Then Joe had found his prostate with the tips of his fingers, stroked it, and Ryan forgot about it. He moaned when Joe took them out, and moaned again when he pushed the head of his cock into his ass and began to slowly slide in. It seemed to take forever and when Joe bottomed out, when he pressed his hips against Ryan’s ass and ground against him, pain came alive from the wounds on his back and Ryan ground back, pushing his bloody back to Joe’s belly and chest.

Joe knew what he was doing--he was seeking out the pain--and it pleased him. He held Ryan up, held him steady with one arm around his waist, but he put the palm of the other flat to his back. The skin on skin contact, the salt and sweat on Joe’s fingers, burned. God, it burned. Ryan hissed at the pain of it and started to move, rocking in his lap. Joe thrust and it jarred him, Ryan’s breath hitching and his hands going automatically back to the wood timber to steady himself. Joe took hold of his waist and that helped. He got on his knees, his stomach pressing down on Ryan’s lower back in a way that forced him to shift up on his, too. The contact, the touch more than that light pressure, hurt more than he could have imagined. As Joe fucked him, and not at all gently as he had promised, each thrust rubbed his body against Ryan’s. His open, still bleeding flesh against Joe’s dry skin was like rubbing salt and sandpaper over a bundle of raw nerves. It was excruciating. It was exquisite. 

Pleasure was rolling in his belly like a lead ball, orgasm close but just out of reach, when Joe put his thumbs out to touch the wet, open wounds on Ryan’s back. He still held Ryan’s waist as they moved, still kept him steady, kept him from falling because he was still weak. He put his thumbs there, reached with them, then dug them into the split, bleeding skin. Ryan jerked back against him with a cry of pain and came. The pain and pleasure were so mingled as to be the same thing and he shuddered, his cries breaking in his parched throat as Joe thrust harder, moved faster, and laughed low and soft in his ear as it roared through him. Then it refused to just slip away the way painless orgasms did because Joe refused to stop hurting him. 

Ryan remembered the words he could say that would make Joe stop. He thought about them, not because it hurt too much or he couldn’t stand it, but because he was tired enough to drop and Joe just wouldn’t let him. He wondered if Joe _would_ stop if he said them or if it was too late. He opened his mouth to say something, maybe even utter those words, but all that emerged were moans and panting breaths. He couldn’t do it.

Joe stilled, wrapped his arms around Ryan’s waist and held him, his head down to rest between Ryan’s shoulders where he could nip at the back of his neck. Between moans, sounds almost like growls escaped him as he came. It seemed to take a long time, his orgasm seemed so slow, but Ryan’s sense of time was all wrong. It probably only lasted seconds. The sensation of Joe coming inside him was still new and strange to him. Joe seemed to know it. He distracted him. He touched his tongue to an open welt between Ryan’s shoulders and licked it. His soft tongue was like broken glass in the wound and Ryan moaned with him, pushed back against him, aching but still responsive. 

It was cold in the slaughterhouse, but Ryan only noticed it when Joe pulled away from him and got up, leaving him on the floor. He turned his head to look for him, but could only see his shadow moving around in the light of the gas lamp. Ryan thought very hard about getting up too, but he couldn’t. Whenever he tried to move much, he started to shake, and there was a roiling feeling of nausea in his stomach that every few minutes felt like it was all going to crawl up his throat. What exactly, he didn’t know. Maybe his supper or maybe his guts. He finally took his hands away from the dry rotted wood board Joe had made him hold onto and clenched his fingers into fists against the ground as he braced himself to stand. He trembled, his muscles like gelatin, and relaxed back on his knees on the floor in defeat. 

There were splinters in his fingers. Ryan could feel them, but it was too dark to search for them and pick them out. 

“Joe?”

There was no answer. There wasn’t even any sound to let Ryan know that Joe was still there somewhere. With a sigh, Ryan sat down. He hissed in a pained breath because Jesus, that _hurt_. Everything hurt, even places where he hadn’t been hit still hurt, like the pain had reached out to the rest of his body, spread itself thin to make it endurable. 

Joe’s boots crunched on the dirt floor as he came back. He hadn’t left Ryan, he had only gone out to the car. The light jumped and shifted when he picked up the lamp. 

“Joe?”

“I’m here,” Joe said. He was leaning over Ryan with the lamp in one hand. Then he had his arms under him and was picking him up, carrying him out of the old building, carrying him down the gravel road to where Ryan had parked the car hours before. When they reached it, Joe set him on his feet and Ryan swayed between him and the side of the car. “Can you stand? Not long, just long enough to get some clothes on.”

Ryan cringed inwardly at the idea of clothes, of cloth of any kind, against his burning back. “I really don’t think so,” he said. 

“I really think it would be unwise of me to take you home looking like this,” Joe said. 

He wasn’t being unkind, not now, and he did have a point. If any of Ryan’s neighbors saw him right now, they would probably call the cops. 

In the end, Ryan consented to put his pants back on and wear his coat, but not a shirt. He couldn’t dress himself, he was too weak and jittery, but having Joe dress him was a strange experience. He was efficient about it and careful, demonstrating a gentleness he had promised but not expressed much before. Ryan was grateful for it. He was dead on his feet and only just barely standing. Joe had, quite simply, wore him out. 

On the drive to Ryan’s place, Ryan slept in the passenger seat clutching his coat around him, his head pillowed on the closed window. He woke up once when Joe turned on the radio, but Joe turned it off again when he found nothing but late night talk shows and pop music. Ryan dozed the rest of the way home, not really sleeping, but not really awake. 

At a red light at a four-way intersection a few blocks from Ryan’s building, with the taxis lined up for a good mile behind them, Ryan said, “Claire’s gonna wonder where you were.”

Joe slid his eyes to him and lifted an eyebrow. 

“It’s getting late,” Ryan said. The blue light of the digital clock on the dash said it was 10 o’clock. Not terribly late, but late for an English professor with a wife and kid to be just getting home and, if the traffic wasn’t bad, it was a drive of more than three and a half hours back to Richmond. “You won’t get home until morning. What are you going to tell her?”

They had been impulsive, thoughtless and foolish when they met and drove out to the old horse slaughterhouse so late in the day. That was obvious. Claire wasn’t out of town or away for the night, she was home. She would be waiting for Joe if he didn’t call her. Ryan wondered if she would sit up, maybe at the kitchen table in her nightdress and robe, drinking tea. Wasn’t that what women like Claire--like the wives of men like Joe Carroll--did when their husbands didn’t come home?

“I thought I might not tell her anything,” Joe said. The light turned green and he gave his attention back to the traffic. “Maybe I’ll tell her I was working late. Grading papers. Planning lessons and lectures. Maybe I laid down on the sofa in my office and fell asleep. I woke up when the janitor came in. I’m so sorry I didn’t call.”

Ryan thought about that, considering the story from several angles, thinking about what it meant that it came to Joe so easily and he felt no guilt about telling it. “What if she went by your office?”

“Then I’ll tell her something else,” Joe said. 

Ryan fell silent and rested his head back against the window. Joe took all the right turns on all the right streets to his apartment building without Ryan’s help. He had only been there a couple of times before and Ryan had been driving, but he remembered the way. When they got there, Joe helped Ryan out of the car. He put an arm around his waist loosely to hold him up as he walked with him to the elevator. Ryan’s hand gripped his arm to steady himself and hold it away from his back as he moved with deliberate, slow steps. He had to grit his teeth to keep quiet because it hurt like hell. 

“I’m going to pay you back for this, you know,” Ryan told Joe when they were in the elevator headed for his floor. “Next time I’ll be helping you walk like an invalid.”

Joe didn’t say anything for a minute, just smiled his slow, arrogant, knowing smile and watched the numbers flash by as the elevator went up. Finally, he said, “You liked it.”

They reached Ryan’s floor and the elevator door slid open. Ryan glared at him before he limped through it and started down the hall. “Shut up and help me, Joe.”

Joe did and when they were in the apartment, the door closed and locked behind them, the lights on and down low, he helped Ryan undress again and filled the bath for him to wash. Ryan cursed all the while Joe helped him into the warm water. He washed his own hair and cleaned the dirt and blood off his own body, but he cursed Joe again when Joe helped him back out of the tub.

Joe didn’t mind. He knew Ryan didn’t mean it.

They decided not to bandage Ryan’s back and leave it to the air. The wounds would scab and then he could bandage it, undoubtedly with Joe’s help again. The fresh, wet cuts and welts were cold and stinging in the air. The pain flared hot every time Ryan drew a breath. He was going to carry the aching, raw reminder of Joe with him every moment of every day until they were healed. He would get used to it, to those thoughts, more and more each day as the pain became less and less. Before they were completely gone, he would need to replace them with something new. His sheets were going to look like something painted in a fit of rage by Jackson Pollock. They would have to be thrown away. 

When Joe stripped his own clothes off and climbed into bed beside him, Ryan thought again about Claire. Then he didn’t mention it and put her out of his mind. He went to sleep with Joe watching him. It was the first time Joe stayed the night and didn’t hurry home so he could at least pretend his wife’s growing suspicions about his infidelity were baseless.


	4. IV.

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,  
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

_Pablo Neruda, Love Sonnet XVII_

The old bed and breakfast looked like something in a horror movie. Not a bad horror movie, but still recognizable. Still highly theatrical. However, if this was supposed to be a play, the director hadn’t given Ryan a script. Still, he had the set now and he knew Joe well. He could probably wing it with some pretty damn good ad-libs.

He pulled a board out of what was left of the wall and crawled through, into a large room with rotting, sagging drapery and rickety, collapsing furniture. About ten feet in front of him, straight ahead, was the bottom landing of a staircase. It looked filthy and unused, but still sturdy enough. He wouldn’t be afraid of falling through the stairs if he had to climb them. 

Ryan turned in a circle, pointing his flashlight as he did to illuminate the room, searching. A thorough search in the dark with only a pocket-sized flashlight was impossible, but nothing jumped out at him from any corners or crevices except more shadows and he had no interest in a thorough search. He was looking for something to indicate which direction to go. Joe wouldn’t hide from him, crouching in the shadows like a ghoul. If he hid, it would be like a tiger watching for his chance to pounce. 

A sudden clatter above on the second floor had Ryan switching the flashlight to his left hand so he could go for his gun, which wasn’t there anymore. It hadn’t been there for years, but the instinct to reach for it still was. He touched his hip where a gun did not lay and let out a sigh. He hadn’t come to this place at all prepared. He was unarmed and he didn’t dare let himself believe that Joe wouldn’t kill him because that was what Joe _did_. Joe had loved him once, perhaps, but ten years on death row with nothing in the world to do but brood about it and turn that love into hate would change anyone. Ryan could understand that; he would still kill Joe first if he could and he wouldn’t apologize. Except he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to do that when he was unarmed. 

There was nothing for it though. Ryan didn’t have a gun. He didn’t have anything but a flashlight small enough to hold between his teeth. He could leave. He _wouldn’t_ , but he could. 

“I came alone, Joe!” Ryan called into the cavernous house. “Isn’t that what you wanted?!”

He passed the flashlight over the stairs and along the wall, making the shadows of the banister posts rise up like trees in the night and slide over it, over the rotting furniture and wall hangings. 

A scream split the darkness and echoed hollowly as if from the bottom of a deep well. Ryan ran for the stairs and took them two at a time to the second floor, then he had to stop and lean on the wall to catch his breath, to calm his heart. The screams, the repeated pleas of, “No! No! No!” which were distorted by sobbing, abruptly cut off. 

Ryan held his hand over his galloping heart and looked around. Where the hell _was_ she? Why was she suddenly so silent? 

They started again, out of nowhere and with no warning. Unmistakably Sarah’s voice, still screaming “no” so loudly that her throat had to be raw, coming from deeper inside the house. Panting, Ryan ran toward the sound, around the staircase, down a hallway to a door. The screams cut off again and he slowed as he approached the entryway, shining his flashlight before him. There was no light here either. There was light nowhere. If Joe was there somewhere, he was waiting for him in the dark and he had all the advantage.

Crumbling plaster and broken glass crunched under Ryan’s feet as he entered another room, this one large and round, high like a tower, with tall, skinny colored windows. He hadn’t noticed it outside, but the room looked like it might be a little tower-shaped construction; a lighthouse. He passed his flashlight over the room and saw more old furniture. Some of it was covered in sheets to protect it for some unknown future time when it might be needed, but there was a small round table set with two uncovered chairs and they were clean of dust. There was a cot with a sleeping bag on it, a cooler on the floor beside it and a laptop computer.

The hollow sound of a glass bottle rolling on the floor had Ryan twisting around to find the source before he even thought about it. His flashlight hit Joe square in the face and cast his shadow, like a giant monster, up the wall. A two-by-four came swinging out of the dark and struck Ryan across the face, sending him to the floor. He hit it, all the air knocked out of him and his face bright hot with pain. If his jaw wasn’t cracked and he hadn’t swallowed a few of his teeth, he would be goddamn lucky. 

Joe always did hit hard. 

The lights came on, but all Ryan could do was stare at the dirt in front of his nose as he tried to breathe. 

“Hello, Ryan,” Joe said. 

_Joe_.

Ryan pushed himself up and got no farther than his hands and knees before Joe ran at him and smashed the length of wood across his back. Ryan fell back to the floor moaning and gasping, watching Joe move around him from the corners of his eyes. The command, though brutally delivered, was a simple one; stay down. He didn’t try to get up again. 

“I was curious to see how your heart was holding up,” Joe said. 

He drew back and kicked Ryan in the stomach. Ryan collapsed on his face, all of the air he had labored to pull back into his lungs, gone. He couldn’t even concentrate on the pain, and there was a great deal of it, because he couldn’t _breathe_ and it was making him panic.

“I see it has its limits,” Joe said, standing over him. 

He paced away and set the two-by-four down against the wall. He was so _calm_. His voice sounded exactly the same as it always had. He spoke the same as he always had. Joe never sounded angry, not unless you knew and were really looking for it. Then there was a little bit of an animal hiss, an added sibilance to his speech like he was speaking through teeth he wanted to grit or bite with. 

It all tickled at memories in the back of Ryan’s mind that he pushed down. He was at Joe’s mercy, which was nothing new, but Joe was right there before him--where was _Sarah_? 

“Where is she?” Ryan asked. He stayed down on the floor as he asked it and watched Joe go to lean against the wall near where a rope was tied in a sailor’s knot to a hitch set in the wood. 

“You know,” Joe said conversationally, “the human eye is connected by seven muscles. I removed each one… individually.”

Ryan’s eyes widened as he understood what Joe was saying. He didn’t quite let himself believe it. She couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t be too late. He had saved her. She had saved him. If she died now, then he hadn’t saved anyone, not a single one, and they were all his fault because he hadn’t seen the monster right in front of him when Joe was in his bed. 

“Do you know how hard that is to do?” Joe asked. 

Something beeped once and the room filled with Sarah’s screaming voice. 

Hope felt like a sick, clawing thing in Ryan’s abused stomach. Maybe Joe hadn’t killed her yet. Maybe he had taken her eyes, but left her alive so Ryan could watch her die. 

“Sarah?!” Ryan called. Lightheadedness washed over him and his eyes fell nearly closed. He still saw Joe watching him, his expression arrogant and pleased, hungry and expectant. 

The screams cut off. The beep, then they started again. They started in the middle of a scream. The same screams Ryan had followed through the house to the room he was now in with Joe, laying on the floor while Joe _teased_ him.

Ryan pushed himself up on his hands and looked across the room at Joe. He met Joe’s eyes and Joe smiled as he held up a little recorder and wiggled it.

“You know how I love my little souvenirs,” Joe said. That hiss, almost a whisper, was in his voice. He was murderously angry, but he was also enjoying the hell out of himself. 

Panting, Ryan let himself fall back on his side on the floor to rest, defeated. When he did, Joe reached over on the wall and brought his hand down on the knotted rope. It came loose, followed by the hiss of rope falling under some weight toward the floor, and Ryan started to get up again to get out of the way. Before he got anywhere, Sarah’s mutilated, bloody face appeared before him. Her body bounced from the velocity of the drop before she dangled there upside down from the end of the rope. 

Ryan screamed. It wasn’t fear, it wasn’t even pain that drew it out of him; it was loss. Simple, profound loss. He had lost her, but she herself was nothing to him except a nice girl he barely knew. With her death, Joe had obliterated any chance Ryan might have had for salvation. For grace. Sarah had been his grace; the forgiveness he didn’t deserve and hadn’t earned. She, of them all, had lived because Ryan Hardy had let himself suspect Joe Carroll at last of murder and followed him. She wiped clean all the times he had ignored his gut feeling that something was very wrong with Joe. Five more girls had died while Ryan was fucking Joe and letting him beat scars into his back. Sarah was number six, but he _saved_ her. 

And she was dead. Ryan couldn’t help feeling like Joe had known what she meant to him.

He bowed his head and made himself stop screaming. 

“She lasted much longer than I thought she would,” Joe said. 

Ryan picked his head up and watched Joe pace toward the center of the room. Closer… Closer…

“She was quite the _fighter_ ,” Joe said. 

Rage, like a red velvet shroud, fell over him and Ryan never felt himself get up from the floor or rush at Joe or back him up to the wall, take him by the throat and squeeze. Just suddenly he was doing it. His hands were around Joe’s throat, his fingers were biting into his skin, into tendons and veins, and he imagined them popping right through, into his very arteries. Joe’s hands were on Ryan’s wrists, but he didn’t try to pull him away, he didn’t scratch him or dig at his arms to make him let go. He just held on, looked into Ryan’s eyes and, incredibly, he smiled. 

“I’d like to turn myself in,” Joe said breathlessly. “I surrender.” 

_No_. Ryan squeezed harder and shoved Joe into the wall. Joe made a strangled, garbling sound, alarm finally reaching his eyes. He was suddenly afraid. _He had said the words_ , but Ryan showed no sign of releasing him. 

“I surrender!” Joe managed to shout.

Ryan kept squeezing and, though Joe had _surrendered_ and Ryan had ignored it, he still didn’t fight him. Ryan had never ignored it before. Never. But that was then and this was now and they were not the same people. They were not in this place for that reason. That had been a long time ago. A lifetime. Joe couldn’t expect him to honor it now, not after what he had done, not after _everything_. Ryan did not accept his surrender. 

Mason came into the room, shouting something that Ryan didn’t even hear. Behind her was Riley. They had tracked him and they had guns and they didn’t seem too sure about who they should point them at. Ryan paid no attention to them, just kept staring into Joe’s eyes, watching to see him begin to fade. He could kill him. He would even _enjoy_ killing him. He wouldn’t kill him like a coward though, and not watch him as he died. 

Joe broke his gaze away to look past Ryan. “I surrender,” he choked out. 

Riley was on him then, pulling Ryan forcibly off of Joe as he kept on reaching for him to put his hands back around his throat to choke the life from him. His fingernails dragged over Joe’s neck as he was torn away from him and Ryan felt his blood there on his fingertips. 

“I surrender,” Joe said again, whispering it. He fell to his knees before Ryan and it was like they all disappeared. Riley, with his arms around Ryan to restrain him, Mason with her gun in Joe’s face and her brow furrowed in confusion, all the other officers and agents with guns filling the round room. Joe was gasping for breath, he had his hands over his head, he was on his knees about to be arrested again and thrown back into prison to die and he was _turned on_. “I surrender… I surrender.”

There was a look on his face that Ryan knew well; _Gotcha._

Back in Richmond, the FBI provided Ryan a motel room and he took advantage of it only long enough to fall into bed and not sleep very much. He was badly bruised from the beating he had taken at Joe’s hands and, no matter how he turned, he couldn’t get comfortable. He went out to get something to eat and didn’t eat much. He stopped at a corner liquor store and sat outside in his car for a long time, before he drove away again without going in.

They had set up office space at the Federal Detention Center where Joe was being held and Ryan was expected to make an appearance, which he did that evening. They had Joe again, but that wasn’t the end. They wanted to know how he had done it; how he had escaped, who had helped him, if it was only Jordy Raines or if there were more, who were they, _where_ were they. Exactly how big was it all or was it nothing but smoke and mirrors and one last hurrah. They wanted to pick Ryan’s brain, he knew, but Ryan’s brain was on ice. It wasn’t going to be much good to them for a while now. Maybe for a long while. 

His thoughts went to his messenger bag and the bottle of vodka he had put there with longing. It was empty, but there was a big gallon bottle in his refrigerator at home and the knowledge of it sat in his mind like an annoying, attention-seeking child. 

Weston was talking about websites and forums and there was a photograph of Jordy on the whiteboard over his shoulder. Ryan barely heard him. He was looking at him, or at least in his general direction, but he was barely even there. Joe was in an interrogation room down the hall. He was close. Ryan could walk right down there, open the door and see him if he wanted to. No one would stop him. He was _too_ damn close. 

Ryan wanted to go home. This wasn’t his problem anymore. He had done what he had been asked to do--more. He had consulted, then he had gone out and hand-delivered their murderer to them. He was done. 

“Hardy,” Mason said, coming into the room. 

Ryan turned toward her. Maybe he’d tell her before he left, see if they could loan him the helicopter again for one more ride back to New York.

“He’ll only talk to you,” Mason said. She seemed annoyed and this time Ryan didn’t blame her. 

_Fuck_. It just fucking figured. Of course he wouldn’t talk to anyone but Ryan. That had been the entire _point_. It was a hell of a lot of bother to go to just because Ryan wouldn’t visit him in prison though. He was up to something more. 

Ryan sighed, trying to mentally prepare himself, and went with Mason down the hall to the room where they had Joe. A buzzer sounded as the door was unlocked for him and Ryan went in. And there was Joe. They had taken his clothes and put him back in the institutional bright orange again. He sat at a table in the middle of the small room and he could have been praying, though Ryan knew that he wasn’t. His head was lowered, but he wasn’t praying, he was thinking and _waiting_. He wanted Ryan and he would get what he wanted if he waited. He still had the advantage; the FBI wanted something from him and Joe had absolutely no reason in the world to give it to them. 

With his eyes closed, Joe’s eyelashes rested on his cheeks like fans. He looked calm and at ease, even rested. He hadn’t killed anyone in ten years. Ryan tried not to imagine what that one kill--Sarah Fuller--had done for him, but he imagined it anyway and knew. Because in many ways, in some of the wrong ways, they were the same. He could put himself in Joe’s shoes easily, slip into Joe’s skin like a hand into a familiar glove, and he knew that Joe took a great, satisfying sense of peace and contentment from the kill. That one more than others. Not only from taking her eyes out by removing the seven muscles holding them one by one, but also from the damage her death had done to _Ryan_. Because Ryan suffered and Joe was a sadist in more ways than only those that required a sharp edge to cut with.

It was one of the less lovely ways in which they were the same.

Joe knew he was there, but he opened his eyes slowly, as if waking from a nap. Ryan remained in front of the door and watched him from there, and for a moment they were just watching each other, _seeing_ each other. There was a weight heavier than any elephant sitting in the room between them. It was made up of days and nights, of touches and secrets and cups of coffee early in the morning. It was the color of the light when it came through the window and touched Ryan’s strawberry blond lashes to make them spark. It was the shape of Joe’s mouth when he smiled just on the one side, the bow of his lips becoming the cut of a knife. It smelled like old paper, lanolin and their mingled sweat. It was the flavor of adrenalin and blood and the thick beat of a racing heart. It weighed so much that Ryan sometimes felt like Atlas carrying the spinning world on his back. As Joe looked at him from his table and lifted his chained wrists from his lap to place his hands upon it, that weight had never felt heavier. 

“Sarah had to die, Ryan,” Joe said. His voice cracked in his hurt throat, but he got it under control. “I know it’s sad. It’s tragic. Poor thing. She had worked very hard to get her life back together. She had done quite nicely, which is more than I can say for _some_.” 

Ryan cocked his head, wondering where this was going. Maybe it wasn’t going anywhere and it was just an excuse to get him alone. So Joe could lecture him to death in godlike Sermon on the Mount fashion? 

God, he needed a drink.

Ryan didn’t say anything. He wasn’t even sure he was thinking anything, except that he could see the impressions of his fingers in bruises around Joe’s neck like a collar. He didn’t want to, but he was thinking about that. The V-neck of the prison shirt Joe wore was just wide enough that he could also see the shining edge of a scar Ryan had put there himself ten years ago to wipe out a scar that had already been there.

“Oh, you’ve been quite the disappointment, Ryan. I never expected you capable of _In Cold Blood_ , but what was it with that true crime _drivel_?” Joe grimaced like he had tasted something foul as he spoke. 

“So what’s my sequel about, Joe?” Ryan asked. Something in his voice--or something _not_ in his voice--made Joe’s eyes narrow. “Everyone outside is anxious to know.”

“Hmm, well,” Joe said. He lowered his eyes in thought for a second. “It’s going to be a collaboration. We’re going to write this together, Ryan. My first book was clearly too avant-garde. Lost in literati pretense. No, my new story will play to a much wider audience. Hell, even Poe _whored_ himself out eventually.”

Ryan understood that the emphasis was for him and didn’t let himself care. He had read the letter to Claire and knew that Joe was mad at him for a lot more than just shooting him in the shoulder, ruining his fun and locking him up. He was mad at him because of Claire, and hadn’t Ryan first let Claire get him into bed because he was mad at Joe? Sure. So he got it. It was ridiculous in the here and now, but he still got it. 

Finally leaving the door to walk into the room, Ryan moved with a slow, casual stride to the table with Joe watching his every movement. He didn’t turn his head, he followed Ryan with his eyes. 

“So, the prison guard… gay neighbors… How do they figure into your new plot?” Ryan said, lowering himself into the folding chair across from Joe. 

Joe’s eyes were narrowed again, watchful and wary. His hands were steepled on the table before him.

“We know about the cult,” Ryan said. 

“I’m not a big fan of that word,” Joe said. He smirked. “I like to think of them as my friends. It’s important to have friends, Ryan. Did you know that the FBI estimates that up to three hundred serial killers are active in the U.S. on any given day?”

Ryan did know that. He also understood what Joe was saying with what he was _not_ saying. That he was just one and there were two hundred and ninety-nine more out there waiting to meet him. That he was a drop in the bucket to the others out there right that second; faceless, nameless others going about their serial killing business. Joe could have easily kept it up for years if Ryan hadn’t stopped him. Ryan himself, who kept dark secrets about very dark urges of his own, might _never_ be caught. Joe, because he knew him in uncomfortably intimate ways, was fucking with him. 

“Do you have any friends, Ryan?” Joe asked. 

Ryan said nothing. He waited to see where this was ultimately going. 

Joe suddenly moved, bringing his hands up from the table and pointing. Ryan didn’t flinch from him. “I will be your friend,” Joe said, smiling. He was leaning over the table toward Ryan and his eyes glittered. That smirk was still there, but he was mad enough to spit in Ryan’s face. “Even though you slept with my wife.”

That again. How interesting. 

Joe took a deep breath and sat back. When he spoke again, he was calm. It wasn’t a calm that Ryan trusted though; it was the calm of perpetual motion. It was the calm of a trapdoor. “Did she show you the letter?”

Ryan’s eyes darted involuntarily to the camera in the corner of the ceiling. It was on and so was the volume. He hadn’t mentioned the letter to anyone and had told Claire not to either. 

“Claire is very important, Ryan,” Joe said, nodding. “Every good story needs a love interest.” Joe looked like he wanted to gnash his teeth. Every story might need a love interest, but this one was killing him just a little bit. “She’s the only woman I’ve ever truly loved. She’s the mother of my son. And I’d like to see her.”

“No, she’d never agree to that,” Ryan said. 

Joe gave him a knowing look. “She might just change her mind about that,” he said.

Ryan wasn’t sure what he was getting at, but he didn’t ask. Joe wouldn’t tell him and it would make him appear weak. It would show his hand. He said nothing and let Joe talk.

Joe changed the subject. “I thought I might go more traditional this time,” he said. “Hero, villain, good versus evil. I need a strong protagonist so that the reader can truly invest. A flawed, _broken_ man, searching for redemption.”

Ryan understood where he was going with _that_ at least. It was all rather pointed, after all. He didn’t want to be the hero in any book by Joe Carroll, but it was all just Joe’s fantasy anyway. Unless he was writing it in his cell with the felt markers they let him have, there was no book and Ryan certainly was not writing one with him. It was the way Joe was justifying what he had done. 

“That,” Joe said, pointing at him again, “is you. You are my flawed hero.” Joe watched Ryan intently and his voice hissed in his barely contained anger. “Yes, I insured that by killing Sarah.”

Ryan leapt up from his chair and walked away. It was that or reach over the table and grab Joe’s throat again to finish strangling him. He looked at the wall and felt his rage seep through a crack in the doorway of his mind as he thought of Sarah Fuller, whom he had saved. He had granted her ten more years, but ten years wasn’t much and saving her hadn’t ever been _about_ saving her. Not after he saw the face of her attacker and knew for sure. After that, it was only about making amends. Her life for all the lives he let Joe take. It wasn’t a great trade, but it was all he’d had. Sometimes it let him sleep at night. Sometimes he went nearly a whole day without wanting to eat a bullet. He had saved that girl from Joe, even though he had loved him and she hadn’t mattered. She lived ten more years and Ryan gave him up--he thought--for good. For the good of all. For the white, like any real hero in a story. Then Joe came along again, despite everything, even the odds, and he undid it all. Sarah and Joe both, together, had been the coin of Ryan’s redemption. Joe hadn’t just cheapened it, he had destroyed it. Now he had so much more to make up for and Sarah Fuller, too. 

Joe was talking. Ryan was listening but he was only half paying attention. 

“She was the inciting incident, the hero’s call to action. No, this is merely the prologue, this is just the beginning. That was the _entire point_ of Sarah’s death.”

Ryan turned his head to look down at him and found Joe staring intently back. He had turned his right hand over on the tabletop, showing Ryan the scar across his palm that was a mirror to the one on Ryan’s own left hand. Memory flooded Ryan’s mind and it was almost enough to wipe away his guilt and loathing. He clenched his left hand into a fist at his side. Joe was twisting the knife and getting off on it. He shouldn’t be surprised. And he really wasn’t. 

Ryan didn’t ask what the point was, but Joe saw the question on his face. “It was for you,” he said softly. 

_Of course it was_ , Ryan thought dully. Nothing else would fit if this was supposed to be the prologue to a book in which he was meant to be a hero. But that wasn’t all of it. What else? There was something, but Ryan couldn’t lock onto it just yet. Something in the way Joe said it, _It was for you_ , like it was a gift. 

Ryan went over to the table where Joe sat and Joe lifted his head and sat back as he approached, eyeing him with cautious expectation. He knew Ryan and he knew that Ryan wouldn’t just leave it at that. He wouldn’t let Joe win so completely without taking his own pound of flesh. 

Ryan stood over him and his rage was cold. He was calm in his anger now, his own voice becoming a whisper as he spoke. “If this book ends with anything but your death, you better plan on a rewrite.”

Joe was still watching him and waiting when Ryan seized his right arm in one hand and his fingers in the other and pulled them sharply back. Ryan could feel the grind and crunch of bone before he heard it and Joe was screaming. It echoed off the walls, in his ears, down through the years of his memory. Ryan jerked and pulled, snapping more bones, ruining Joe’s hand. It was his dominant one, but also the scarred hand that he had flashed at him. He would punish Joe and, in the same fell swoop, disable him a little. It was odd how Ryan found himself more angry with Joe for playing with his emotions and teasing him with his memories than he was for murdering Sarah Fuller and dangling her in front of him. He had thought himself long past all of that. 

At first, Joe’s screams were wordless, but as Ryan twisted his fingers, they started to make sense. “Guards! Guards! Stop, no,” he begged Ryan. 

Joe could reach Ryan’s hand where he was twisting and pulling his fingers, but Joe didn’t try to claw at him or make him stop. Another time, out of love, Ryan would have stopped on his own, but his love was a sick, withered up thing in the pit of his stomach now, and he didn’t have a drop of mercy left for Joe Carroll. 

The guards burst into the room and Ryan squeezed Joe’s fingers together one last time to hear the bones grind before he was pulled off and restrained by one of them. They unfastened Joe’s chains from the table and started hauling him from the room, one on either side of him. They were rescuing him, but as soon as Ryan was no longer touching him, Joe wasn’t screaming in pain anymore. He was practically laughing.

“Call Claire,” Joe said over his shoulder. He was hauled toward the door, but he paid the guards and his chains no more attention than he paid to the air. “It’s just the beginning. It’ll be a classic. It’ll be _our masterpiece_. Call Claire. Call Claire!” 

Ryan remained in the interrogation room until he had himself under control, then he left so that he could use his phone without being overheard by whoever might still be watching him on the camera. He didn’t want to, it was playing right into Joe’s hands to do it, falling into the role of hero for Joe’s psychotic little fantasy book, but he called Claire. There was no answer for a long time. Long enough that Ryan started down the hall to the room where he would find Weston and Riley as it went on ringing. When it was finally picked up, he halted in his tracks. 

“Claire?”

“This is Detective Jacobson. May I ask who’s calling?”

“This is Ryan Hardy. Is Claire there?”

“Yes, sir, but…”

“What’s wrong?”

“Mr. Hardy, Joey Matthews and his nanny are missing.”

“I’ll be right there,” Ryan said. He started walking again.

“Are you--?”

“I said, I’ll be right there,” Ryan repeated. “Tell Claire.”

He hung up and walked back into the room where Weston, Riley and Mason were no longer reclined at their desks or studying their notes and evidence on the whiteboards. Mason was in fact not present, and both Riley and Weston frowned when they saw him. 

“Did anyone call you yet?” Ryan asked them, not bothering with apologies about his behavior that he did not want to make. They exchanged a look and Ryan snapped, “About Claire. About the boy, Joey. Did anyone call you yet?”

“Ah, no. Guess not,” Weston said. “Why? Did something happen?”

Ryan couldn’t fucking believe this. It was likely that no one had told them about it yet because everyone at the Matthews residence was still hoping to find Joey hiding in a closet somewhere. It was still incredible to him how no one ever seemed to know what to do. 

“Agent Riley, would you please ride with me to the Matthews residence?” Ryan said, trying for patience and calm. When the agent didn’t move, that drifted away like smoke. “ _Now_.”

“Hardy, I think you need to have a seat and calm down,” Riley said. “You butted heads with Joe Carroll and you’re all freaked out about it. We get it. But there’s nothing going on or we’d know.”

“Oh, right. Of course,” Ryan said. “That’s why you already know that Joey Matthews and his nanny are missing. This just after Joe told me I should call Claire Matthews. After all the evidence we’ve seen pointing to cult behavior. The _nanny_ is missing with the _kid_. That’s not even a little suspicious to you, _agents_? Get your coat and your fucking car keys. We’re going.”

Riley didn’t look like he believed him and Ryan was getting really damn tired of people not believing him. He started for the door and behind him Riley got up and followed him. “You can call the house on the way. Who knows, maybe they found him under the bed.”  


  
**2003**

They were in an abandoned house that Ryan would forever after think of as the Glass House because of its many large picture windows in front as much as for what they did there. About half of the windows had been busted out by kids with rocks or bricks or cinderblocks and the glass lay in pieces on the carpeted floor of the big, half circle sitting room. There was so much of it that it was impossible to walk without it crunching underfoot and the floor looked like a container of glitter had exploded in the center of the room, everything dazzling to the eye. 

It was a Friday and Ryan had left a horrible crime scene that morning, after almost 32 hours with no sleep and pictures of the latest dead girl haunting his weary mind, to find Joe in his office at the university. Joe had been reading at his desk, but he put it away immediately when Ryan fell into the chair across from him and told him what had happened. He listened until he was finished, then closed up his office and went with Ryan out to his car. 

They went to the Glass House because Joe knew what Ryan needed, that it wasn’t sleep and it wasn’t comfort, it wasn’t advice or reassurance. It was a lot more basic than that. He needed a place to turn his anger, a way to channel it, and he had found that in Joe. 

They had discovered the house a week earlier, but the windows hadn’t been broken then. It was a large house, three stories high with a widow’s walk that overlooked about five acres set back from the road, separated from the nearest neighbors by trees and overgrowing shrubbery. They had remembered the house for its seclusion and now Joe took him there. They climbed through one of the broken windows and passed through the sitting room with glass snapping under their feet into the hallway beyond it. To be safe and make sure there weren’t any homeless people squatting in the place, Ryan and Joe walked through the rooms on the first floor, but they found nothing. There was a raccoon’s nest in a closet of one of the bedrooms, but it was empty. They called into the house and listened for an answer or the sound of movement from anyone in the upper two floors, but there was nothing. A crow scolded them from a tree outside.

Returning to the hallway outside of the glass littered sitting room, Joe walked ahead of Ryan and shed his clothes along the way. He was dressed casually, in jeans and a shirt with one of his cardigan sweaters over it, and he was soon naked. He turned to Ryan and stood in the doorway between the hall and the sunny sitting room, arms straight out at his sides with his fisted hands pressed to the doorjamb. Ryan took a moment to just admire him like that and Joe smiled slowly as the moment lengthened into a minute and he didn’t move. 

“Ryan.”

Ryan pulled his shirt off over his head and sat on the floor to untie his shoes. 

Joe watched him and sank to his heels in a crouch. “If you would rather go out for coffee, I would understand,” Joe said. “You’ve had a very bad, very long day. If you’re not up to--”

“Shut up, Joe,” Ryan said. He kicked his shoes aside and reached for him. 

With a smug little smile, Joe went to him and let Ryan lay him down on the floor. “A very, _very_ bad day,” he said. Ryan kissed him and Joe kissed him back, still smiling to himself. “You’re usually not so rude.”

“Bullshit. You’re always telling me I’m rude,” Ryan said. His lips twitched in an involuntary smile of his own. 

He sat back and took a jackknife out of his pocket. Joe followed his hand with his eyes as Ryan flicked it open and tilted the blade to let the sunlight catch on the edge. It was incredibly sharp. He had sharpened it in anticipation of using it on Joe.

“What _ever_ are you going to do with that?” Joe murmured.

Ryan tapped the tip of the knife against Joe’s chest, then drew his hand down, the edge trailing feather light along his sternum without cutting him. Joe’s gaze rested on Ryan’s face and didn’t shift even as Ryan put pressure on the knife and cut him. He didn’t slice with a quick jerk of his wrist, a snick of the knife cutting through flesh, he drew it with slow deliberation over Joe’s ribs. A horizontal line tracing the curve of his ribcage. Joe shivered, his skin twitching lightly, but he watched Ryan’s face as Ryan cut into him. The first cut was shallow, though not hesitant. Ryan was merely working up to it and started with a cut barely deeper than a bad cat scratch. Cuts didn’t have to be deep to be painful though, and there was pain, it followed the slow line of the blade until Ryan lifted it. The pain became a dull ache, but Ryan immediately began to cut another line just below the first. 

“Ryan.”

Ryan’s eyes were on the knife in his hand, but at his name, he glanced up to find Joe watching him. He was shivering very faintly, aroused, but forcing himself to remain still for Ryan’s knife. He looked between Ryan and the blade and swallowed. He didn’t have to say anything or ask for what he wanted, Ryan could see it all over his face. 

“All right, Joe,” he said. 

The next cut was deeper, just as slow, blood welling up in it and seeping around the tip of the blade to slide down Joe’s side and pat on the floor. Some of the blood from the cut went the other way and flowed down to his navel to gather there. Ryan lowered his head to press his mouth to that cut, let his tongue delve into it and stroke between the lips of the wound. Joe’s blood tasted a little like thin milk with salt diluted in it. Joe moaned and brought one of his hands up to cup the back of Ryan’s head. Ryan set his teeth into the cuts, his upper teeth in one and lower teeth in another, pinching the uncut flesh between them. Joe cried out and arched up from the floor against him, his fingers tightening in Ryan’s hair. He didn’t pull him away, he held on, shuddering, squirming restlessly beneath him. 

Without picking up his head, Ryan dropped the knife on the floor and reached down to unfasten the buckle of his belt. Joe’s cock was hard and caught between his body and Ryan’s chest. Joe rocked his hips up a little, trying to get some friction, but Ryan sat up. Joe caught a glimpse of Ryan’s face with his blood staining his lips crimson before Ryan wiped an arm over his mouth and it was gone. This time when Ryan picked up the knife, Joe made a sound in his throat of complete frustration. 

Ryan smiled and put the knife down on Joe’s chest. “Hold that,” he said.

“Ryan--”

Ryan hissed at him to be quiet and rose up on his knees to push his pants down his hips. Joe put a hand out and ran his fingers up Ryan’s body, palm pressing into his belly and pushing up, over his chest until his fingers could reach farther. He curled his fingers against Ryan’s neck, wanting to pull him down but not quite able to. Ryan obligingly leaned over and Joe’s long fingers slipped up the back of his neck into his hair, pulling him down as Joe leaned up. Ryan let his eyes run over Joe and took him in, beneath him on the floor, supine and yielding, blood from cuts that were still bleeding freely gathering in the hollow of his stomach and painting streaks down his waist to stain the pale carpet. He smirked and watched Joe’s eyes narrow, his own lips twitch. 

Ryan thrust into him and had the satisfaction of seeing that faint knowing smile disappear and those gleaming eyes snap wide. Joe let out his breath in a rush and moaned deep in his throat, eyes falling almost closed again and a pleased smile threatening to grow wide as he watched Ryan through his lowered lashes. Ryan took his hips in his hands and pulled Joe down on him until he was as deep inside him as he could be. He could feel the soft vibration of Joe’s heartbeat in his skin and along the shaft of his cock when Joe bore down, squeezing around him. 

The knife Ryan had laid down on Joe’s chest slid a little as Joe lifted his stomach, trying to coax Ryan to move. The blood that had gathered in his bellybutton and the crease of his sternum spilled over, painted his hip and thigh red and slid wetly between them into their pubic hair. Ryan grunted out a breath and fell forward to catch himself with his hands on the floor over Joe’s shoulders. Their faces were inches apart, their panting breaths puffing between their mouths, but rather than kiss him, Ryan let Joe come to him. Joe did and kissed the lingering tang of his own blood from Ryan’s lips as Ryan took up the knife again.

The scar on Joe’s chest, the one shaped just a little like a smiley, the one someone else had put there a long time ago just a short walk of the fingers away from the hollow of his throat, that scar came off under the sharp edge of Ryan’s knife like a hard piece of wax. It curled against the knife, then flattened back out as blood welled from the cut and weighed it down. Joe screamed and it shattered the silence like the crash of breaking glass and echoed through all the rooms and hallways of the big house. Ryan felt Joe’s screams in the hollow pit of his stomach, the way they shook between them, the way they filled him up and stroked him like a fisted hand, and he was almost overwhelmed. He twisted the knife in the deep, bleeding open wound he had made and Joe started to beg and plead with him, but he didn’t say the words and without them, all of his noes were really yeses. The hollow of Joe’s throat filled up with blood that Ryan sucked away as Joe moaned and begged him to stop. 

“Say it,” Ryan said. He moved his mouth up the slope of Joe’s neck to his ear and whispered it. “Just say it. Do you want me to stop?”

“Yes,” Joe whispered back, hissing it through his teeth. He tightened his legs around Ryan’s waist and pulled him in. “Stop. Please stop… playing with me and _do it_.”

Ryan laughed and turned his head to meet Joe’s eyes. He found him looking back, pupils dilated and body quivering with tension against him. He wasn’t asking for Ryan to stop hurting him or forget it and just fuck him, he wanted him to do both. 

Ryan moved his hands up Joe’s sides and dug the fingers of his left hand into the cuts he had made over Joe’s ribs. Joe bit down on a scream, but it still strained in his throat to escape. Ryan ducked his head to kiss him and felt the rumble of it on his tongue. 

“Say it first and I will,” Ryan said. “What do you want, Joe? Tell me.”

“I don’t _need_ to say it,” Joe said. He turned his head and lightly nipped Ryan’s earlobe. “But I will if that’s what you need to fuck me while the pain is still fresh and sharp and the blood is still wet. Is that what _you_ want, Ryan?”

It was. Joe saw the answer there in his eyes.

“I surrender,” Joe whispered. Ryan shivered and he said it again, “I surrender. Ryan, I surrender.”

Ryan rested his forehead on Joe’s shoulder for a moment and moaned. They were both shivering when Ryan started to move. He went slow at first, a rocking, inward grinding of his hips that wasn’t quite enough. Rather than soothing the desire for more, it was maddening. He quickened his pace, braced his weight over Joe on his arms, his hands digging into the carpet as he thrust harder, faster, his weight behind every thrust, forcing gasps and moans from Joe’s throat, his breath hitching. Joe squeezed his legs against Ryan’s sides and rocked up against him, catching his rhythm. The blood on his skin had started to clot, though the cuts still seeped, the friction of their skin rubbing together as they moved smeared it until it was tacky. It pulled like the glue in tape and opened the wounds again just as they were beginning to stop bleeding, irritated the skin at the mouths of the cuts, pulled at them until they widened. Their sweat got in the cuts and stung. Blood seeped from the cuts and slid down Joe’s belly, slippery and cold, warmed between them. 

“Ryan, take my hand,” Joe murmured in his ear. “Take it.”

Without looking up, Ryan shifted his weight to one arm and grabbed Joe’s hand; Joe’s right hand with his left. Something hard and brittle on Joe’s palm crunched against Ryan’s as he threaded their fingers together and squeezed. Sharp, blinding agony stabbed through his hand and went all the way to his elbow, up to his shoulder. Ryan’s fingers spasmed in Joe’s hand, the pain intense and crisp, excruciating in a way that did not lessen to a throb but kept on, like grinding teeth. Ryan squeezed Joe’s hand harder, felt the glass in their hands snap and crackle under the pressure, the tiny edges driving into their skin, cutting their hands wide open. Joe cried out and jerked against him, his eyes falling closed, tension quaking down his body. Ryan gritted his teeth, kept squeezing, and watched Joe’s face as his expression passed from pleasure to pain and back again. Blood leaked between their fingers and smeared on the carpet, pain like the sting of a thousand angry insects ground in their hands, intensifying as Ryan grasped his hand tighter, the glass working into their palms as he fucked him. 

Joe bit down on Ryan’s shoulder when he came and screamed into his flesh. The sound rang down Ryan’s back like the hum of a tuning fork, the pain of the bite so muted by the grinding glass that he barely felt it. As the pleasure of his orgasm drained away, Joe’s cries became moans of tired pleasure. He licked over the imprint his teeth had left in Ryan’s shoulder and kissed him there, up his neck, beneath his jaw. Ryan turned his head to catch his mouth and kiss him back, then dropped his mouth to the hollow of Joe’s throat, to the wound left by the scar he had cut off, and sucked it. He pressed his teeth into it and pulled the skin through them, shaking with pleasure at the sound of Joe’s pained cries and the taste of his blood on the back of his tongue. He came like that, his orgasm going through him like a stabbing knife, and screamed into Joe’s chest, his teeth cutting against the point of his collarbone. Joe wrapped his free arm around his shoulders and traced his fingers through the sweat on Ryan’s back. Ryan moaned and slumped against him, his full weight on him and too tired to care. 

“Do you feel better?” Joe asked him after a minute of just laying there. 

“I’m not supposed to feel better,” Ryan said. He pushed himself up, then stopped when he realized their hands were still clasped together, the glass still piercing them both. “You didn’t see it. If you had seen it…”

“I’m sorry it was so awful for you,” Joe said. 

He sat up and they carefully pulled their hands apart. He turned his right hand to examine it and picked a shard of glass out with his fingers. Most of it was so thoroughly broken that the glass was like grains of coarse salt, but he picked out the larger pieces and flicked them away. When he was done, he took Ryan’s hand and did the same for him. They would get the rest out with tweezers from the first aid kit under the seat in Ryan’s car later.

“She almost looked alive, except for the eyes,” Ryan said. “He took the eyes again. Otherwise, she was… perfect.”

“How gruesome,” Joe said. “But do you feel any better now?”

Ryan shook his head, but what he said was, “Yeah. Yeah, I guess I do.”

Joe drew his knees up and wrapped his arms around them. “Good. Would you like to have dinner with me tonight?”

“I shouldn’t,” Ryan said. There were a thousand other things he should do instead. 

“But you’re going to anyway,” Joe said smiling at him. 

Ryan sighed. “Yeah.”


	5. V.

This is love that I'm feeling  
Does it have to be a life full of dread? 

_PJ Harvey "This Is Love"_

They did not find Joey Matthews in a closet or hiding under the bed. He was gone, taken by the nanny who turned out to not be a nanny after all, but a devotee of Joe’s hiding in plain sight, just like the couple who had taken Sarah Fuller. She drugged the guards, ditched the car, disappeared with the kid and now Ryan wasn’t done. Even with Joe locked up again, he wasn’t done because Claire had asked him to find her son, knowing he couldn’t ever tell her no. 

There was nothing he could do about it now, though. The FBI was looking into it, they had people trying to track the girl down, looking into who she was, who she had been, where she might go, what her connection was to Joe Carroll. Nothing Ryan could help with. He would only be in the way until they dug up something he could use. 

He stopped at a liquor store again, but this time he went inside and came back out with a fifth bottle of vodka in a paper bag. Back at the motel, he left all lights off except the light in the bathroom. The orange glow was enough to see by with the bathroom door open and it was all Ryan wanted. 

He sat on the side of the bed in his underwear and T-shirt and drank vodka straight from the bottle until he was so drunk he would stagger if he stood up. He didn’t stand up, not right away, just sat there trying not to think about Joe. The way Joe’s hand had fluttered to his wrist when Ryan pulled his fingers back and they snapped. Joe’s hand warm on his arm, holding onto him, but not to pull him away; to steal a touch. Ryan had never before broken any of his bones. No matter how violent they were with each other, it was always tempered with something else, restrained by affection and love. They had never broken anything but skin and the only time either of them had attacked the other in violence for the sake of nothing but violence had been that night at Sarah Fuller’s when Joe stabbed him in the heart and Ryan shot him, but even then, Ryan had pulled the shot. If Joe had been anyone else, he would have killed him dead right then and there, but he had pulled it at the last second and shot Joe in the shoulder instead of center mass. But Joe had beaten him down to the floor the night before and Ryan had tried to choke the life out of him, and he could still hear the grind of bone as he broke Joe’s fingers, the little popping sounds they made like twigs snapping. That hand with the scar in the middle, the brittle, ringing snap of glass, the taste of blood on the back of his teeth, Joe’s blood, come and sweat on his skin, pain shooting up his arm, bringing him to breathless orgasm. He hadn’t broken Joe’s fingers for anything but revenge, but it didn’t matter why. The gloves were off, they were no longer restrained by love and the words were meaningless. Ryan wouldn’t listen to them or say them ever again.

_If this book ends with anything but your death, you better plan on a rewrite._

He would be satisfied if it ended with his own death instead. He hadn’t said that aloud to Joe--there were a lot of things he couldn’t say aloud to Joe because of the cameras and all the eyes--but either way. Either way would do. Joe had ruined him. He wouldn’t just lie down and let someone kill him, but he would rather die than watch Joe strapped down and put to sleep like a vicious dog. He couldn’t tell him that either. No, that would sound particularly strange to all the special agent ears and eyes. Before all this, he had been counting down the days, hoping that when it was over, it would be _over_. Someone would call him with the news or he’d see it on CNN and it would be done and he could forget about Joe because the only ones who knew about them were the two of them and how did that saying go? Two people can keep a secret only if one of them is dead. He didn’t know how true that was, but might it be possible for him to bury Joe and all of his memories and everything he had felt and wanted when he was in his arms with Joe Carroll’s corpse? Would it make him better? Would he feel redeemed? No. No, no he wouldn’t, not at all, not even a little. He would just go back to slowly dying, one drink at a time. 

_It was for you_ , Joe whispered in his mind. 

_Does this hurt?_

_Would you like me to go deeper?_

Ryan put his face in his hands and breathed deeply. After a minute, when the voice in his mind remained silent, he got up and went to the little closet space at the back of the room. There were three hangers on a pole back there that would slide back and forth but not come off without some serious effort. Ryan had stashed his suitcase on the floor and he pulled it out. Inside, under his wrinkled, folded shirts, his other tie, his other ill-fitting suit, there was a box. Inside the box was a mini cassette recorder and fourteen cassette tapes. One for each girl Joe had tortured and killed and one more. Joe’s fourteenth victim had been Sarah Fuller’s roommate, but Joe hadn’t played with her, he hadn’t been there for her, he had just killed her to get her out of his way. The fourteenth tape had been meant for Sarah Fuller, the one who got away. The FBI had all of the tapes but one and Ryan’s were all copies of the originals except for that one. That one tape meant for Sarah Fuller that ended up being something else completely. 

Ryan took the box back to the bed and dug in the pocket of his discarded trousers until he found a little flash drive he had put there earlier. There was nothing on it but a copy of the recording Joe had made of Sarah Fuller. Sarah Fuller screaming “no” over and over until her voice broke and her eyes were gone and Joe was done with her. Ryan put it in the box with the tapes and picked up the tape recorder. Inside was the last tape, the one that had been recording in the pocket of Joe’s hooded sweater the night Ryan caught him. 

He pressed the PLAY button on the side and sat down, vodka held loosely in one hand as Joe’s voice filled the room. There wasn’t much left and it sloshed at the bottom of the bottle. 

“Hello, Sarah,” Joe said. 

Sarah Fuller whimpered and said, “Why?”

Joe’s answer was a soft laugh that sent ripples of tension down Ryan’s body, awakened a coil of unwanted desire in his belly. He tipped the bottle up and drank, toasting Joe’s laughter and cursing himself as he swallowed and alcohol burned its way down into his gut. 

Sarah screamed as Joe went to work on her. He had carved her up, cut her stomach open deep enough to slide a hand into more than once. Ryan could hear the knife go in when Joe plunged it into Sarah’s stomach because he drove it in so hard the guard made a hollow smacking sound in her flesh. There had been bruises there from the knife guard when Ryan visited her in the hospital. She screamed. She screamed a lot, but before Joe could continue, there was the clatter of breaking glass and the crash of Ryan entering the house, following those screams. 

“Behind you,” Sarah whispered. Her voice in the dark made the fine hairs on the back of Ryan’s neck stand on end. 

Another crash. Ryan remembered hitting that bookcase, but not feeling it. The sound of another stabbing wound, though that one hadn’t been nearly as forceful as those Joe inflicted on Sarah. Was it bad aim or good that the knife went into his heart? Ryan never knew, and if Joe had ever bothered to tell him in any of the many letters he had sent him over the years from prison, Ryan had never read it. Joe was good with a knife, but it had been dark. Ryan hadn’t been laying still for him, he tried to get up, then the blade went in and he fell back on the floor, something very, very wrong. His own voice groaning, the sound of it strange no matter how many times Ryan listened. The sound of footsteps on a wood floor, Joe had turned away from him and gone back to Sarah to finish the job. 

Ryan jumped at the blasting sound of his gun going off. It had happened ten years earlier and he had known it was coming, but he still jumped. 

“Joe? Joe, hey, are you alive?”

Ryan drank more vodka and waited for it to burn a hole in his belly before drinking again. 

_Joe_. His concern had been for Joe, not Sarah, not the victim, but Joe. 

Joe hadn’t answered him, but Ryan remembered crawling across the floor to him, placing his fingers on his throat to feel for a pulse. When he found it, he dug his phone out of his pocket and called it in. Ryan listened only that far, then shut off the tape. There was more. Several minutes of breathing, Sarah in pain, Ryan realizing the longer he laid there that something was wrong with his heart, that maybe he hadn’t survived after all. Then more footsteps, anxious voices, shouting, men and women throwing orders around and demanding answers Ryan couldn’t give them yet. Police sirens, car doors creaking, static voices on cop radios. They didn’t find the tape on Joe, Ryan found it when he was feeling for a pulse. He took the recorder, but forgot to turn it off. The tape ran itself to the end in his coat pocket sometime just after they arrived at the hospital. 

He thought of Sarah’s eyes, the empty holes in her face like coffee stains on a napkin, and there was guilt there ready to rise up and consume him, but something else, too. A voice. Not Joe’s voice. He heard that voice in the back of his mind, whispering its serpentine seduction every day. More when he closed his eyes and still more when his defenses were down. It was why he had started drinking so much in the first place. Not to drown it out, but to tune it in. This other voice was all his own, whispering, and he hadn’t listened to it in a very long time. It whispered that it was all because of him that they had died. Joe had killed before Ryan, but there were more after they met. Five more women died while Ryan was fucking Joe. But that voice didn’t whisper guilt, it whispered of death and aroused feelings he usually kept tightly locked away. Feelings of pleasure, sadistic feelings that remind him that, though he never held the knife or plunged it into Sarah Fuller’s belly, there was a dark, forbidden hollow in his mind where he stored his secrets. This secret: that something in him had called to something in Joe all those years ago because they were the same. The biggest secret, the one he wouldn’t even tell himself unless he was so blotto he was ready to spin right off the edge of the world: that he dreamed sometimes about killing them, all the girls in all the pictures who screamed for Joe on all the tapes Ryan had kept for all these years. He dreamed about others; Claire, his sister, a pretty girl in a bar who stopped to buy him a drink and slip him her number. He woke from such dreams panting, his blood pumping, heart racing, so incredibly turned on that he shook with it. 

The bottle was empty. Ryan tipped it up as far as he could, then threw it in the little trash can next to the bed. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t what he really wanted either. 

Ryan staggered into the bathroom and got in the shower. The shower had bars in it mounted to the wall for old people and drunks to hold themselves up on and it made him laugh. 

What he wanted was Joe. Even as he thought it, his mind recoiled from the familiar longing and he turned on the shower. He turned it on cold so that the drops of water hitting his alcohol warmed skin were tiny slicing scalpels.

Ryan liked Debra Parker a lot more than he had Jennifer Mason and he wasn’t sorry to see Mason go. She wasn’t as smart as she thought she was and she let her ambition get in her way and Ryan’s, and worse, she made him itchy and restless. In the short time he had known her, he had caught himself imagining her dead a lot, usually by his own hand. He couldn’t be expected to work with someone like that. 

That morning he had gotten up with a hangover and been called to another sorority house, this one full of dead girls. Jordy had been cutting them up and carving their eyes out while Ryan downed a fifth of vodka and listened to Sarah Fuller scream in his motel room. He hadn’t done as clean a job of it as Joe had, but Joe had a lot more experience and Jordy didn’t strike Ryan as being particularly intelligent or detailed. He didn’t try to cover his tracks at all. In fact, he left his tracks everywhere. It was messy. Very messy. 

Reilly and Parker wanted to throw Claire in to Joe like bait, get him to drop his guard and talk, tell them all his secrets. Joe was too damn smart for that, but nothing Ryan said would sway them. Joe wasn’t a stupid man and he hadn’t been caught because he was dumb, that had been Ryan’s dumb luck. It was a fallacy that serial murderers were stupid people, most of them fell into IQ ranges in the genius numbers or very close to it, and Joe was one of those. He had been in prison for a long time, he wasn’t about to forget where he was and drop them any information unless he wanted them to have it. They were giving him exactly what he wanted.

“You know, you’re going to get her killed if you’re not careful,” Ryan told Parker. 

“Joe Carroll will be shackled and handcuffed to the table,” Parker said. “We’re going to be watching the whole time. There will be guards just outside the door. She’ll be fine. We’ll protect her.”

Ryan turned to her, eyes flat, head throbbing, a combination of wretched hangover and this new frustration. “When he escaped the other day, Joe killed five men--prison guards--in under two minutes and didn’t get a single scratch or bruise on him. That’s five men in the same room with him, full freedom of motion, and every one of them armed with a handgun, a club and mace, trained to subdue men just like Joe Carroll. None of them got off a shot. Less than _two minutes_. So, yes, if you put Claire Matthews in that room with him, shackles or no shackles, if he wants her dead, she will be.”

“You’re still alive,” Parker pointed out. 

Ryan just snorted and pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. That was different and they both knew it. She didn’t know what really made it different and thought Joe hadn’t tried anything with him because Ryan had been cast as the hero in his fantasy book, but that wasn’t really why. Joe had wanted very badly to see Ryan while he was in prison, had learned all he could about him from within its walls, had never stopped writing to him in over nine years, though Ryan never responded. Joe hadn’t planned his escape and gathered his followers, then involved Ryan in it just to fill an opening in the cast. Ryan had come first, the rest had built up around him. 

Ryan hadn’t slept much the night before and he had been thinking about it. He couldn’t seem to shut it off. 

“That’s different and you know it,” Ryan said. 

“You’re different, you mean,” Parker said. 

“Yeah,” Ryan said, annoyed, “I _am_. You’re going to get her killed and he’s not going to tell you anything. Don’t you get it? He doesn’t have anything to lose. They can’t execute him twice.”

Parker considered what he said then. He could see her thinking about it and worrying, but in the end, they put Claire in the dungeon with the dragon anyway, and it was Ryan who had to lie to her and reassure her that she would be safe. 

Claire _wanted_ to do it because they had convinced her that Joe was the key to finding her son and she was stupid when it came to her son. Joey made her weak and Joe would smell that weakness on her. He wasn’t going to tell her anything. If their positions had been reversed, Ryan wouldn’t have. 

Ryan watched the whole thing on monitors with Reilly, Parker and Turner. Claire _looked_ afraid standing there in the open doorway and Ryan thought, _This is bad_. He couldn’t see it going any other way. 

Joe started playing with her the moment Claire sat down at the table across from him. “My hands are shaking. My god, you still have that affect on me. You’re so beautiful, always--”

“Where’s my son?” Claire demanded. 

Ryan rolled his eyes. It had begun. First thing out of her mouth and she showed her hand. Claire really was, as Joe had told him all those years ago, a gentle soul; she didn’t begin to know how to play the game. Joe’s expression of eagerness fell off his face like a mask and the eyes that regarded her over the table were dead and pitiless. 

“ _Our_ son, Claire.”

“Please, Joe. Where is he?”

This was _pointless_. Ryan had coached her before she went in there and it was like she hadn’t even heard a word he said. Joe was going to eat her alive, if for no other reason than because he had been on death row for nine years and he was _bored_. She wasn’t making it difficult. 

“Do you remember when we went to Antigua?” he asked her. “We rented that… that little cottage on the beach. We were only supposed to be there for a few days, but it turned into a whole month. I don’t think we wore clothes the entire time--”

Claire was starting to see what was happening. Ryan could see her thinking. She wasn’t a stupid woman, but if he could _see_ her thinking, Joe, who was sitting only a few feet from her, saw it too. She had caught on, but not in time. It wasn’t going to matter. 

“He’s growing up so fast, Joey is,” Claire said. “He’s so brilliant, reading well beyond his years; Melville and Twain. He finished _Robinson Caruso_ last week, but he didn’t like it very much--”

Joe had fallen silent and stared her. He was listening, but he was eyeing her the way he might have if a cockroach crawling over the table had suddenly sat up and started to talk. “It must be so hard for you,” he said. “You must feel so betrayed. Again.”

Next to Ryan, Parker sat forward, her nose almost touching the monitor. “Come on, Claire. Hang in there.”

Ryan slanted his eyes to the side and scowled at her. This was a mess. So far, Joe was just trying to drag Claire down Memory Lane with him, but he had asked to see her, not the other way around. They all knew what Claire wanted from Joe, but what did Joe want from her?

Claire looked like she was about to crack. Her lips quivered, her eyes were wide and afraid. Joe watched her dispassionately, the warmth gone from his expression and demeanor again like it had never been there at all. 

“So, you… got my letter?” Joe asked. 

Ryan let out a breath and cocked his head a little, frowning. The letter. Not any of the letters he had sent to Ryan, but the one he had sent to Claire. Why?

“Is he in danger, Joe?” Claire asked, ignoring his question. “Please, just let him be okay, okay? Please don’t let him be hurt.”

“I’d like some answers to my questions,” Joe said. 

Claire hesitated. She didn’t want to talk about it, all too aware that they were being watched. She wanted her kid back though, and Joe was the key. He was the only one who could give him back to her. “Tell me where Joey is first.”

Ryan almost laughed, but he bit it back. 

“I asked you some very specific questions and I would like you to answer them,” Joe insisted, speaking slowly and deliberately. 

He didn’t promise her anything in return, but Claire wasn’t really paying attention. Her mind was on Joey, she wanted to know about Joey, so she saw his demand as quid pro quo. 

“Yes,” she said. 

“Yes… you what?” Joe prompted. 

“Ryan and I had an… an affair for almost two months.”

Joe nodded like she had merely confirmed what he already knew and looked up at the camera. He looked at Ryan, looked right through the camera, right through the monitor at him, and incredibly, he seemed disappointed in him. 

Ryan dropped his eyes and was surprised to find that he was a little ashamed. Which was absurd. By then, Joe had been sentenced, he was in prison, he had no right to expect fidelity from either of them, least of all from Ryan. 

“After the trial?” Joe asked, slanting his eyes back to Claire. 

“And the divorce,” Claire said. 

“Oh yes,” Joe said. He chuffed amused laughter and nodded. “Of course. You waited for the divorce. Noble, Claire. Only a proper little diddle will do.” Joes voice dropped and hissed a little then. “Was it good? The sex? Did your body quiver to his every touch?”

Ryan knew what Joe had wanted from Claire now. It hadn’t been about Claire at all, though no one else would ever know it. _Ryan_ knew because he was the only other one who knew it all. It was their secret. Joe didn’t give a damn about who Claire fucked or when it had happened, except she had fucked _Ryan_ , and how dare she?

Claire leaned toward him a little and rubbed it in. “Yes,” she whispered, “it did.”

Joe’s lips thinned and his jaw tightened. The tendon on the side of his neck stood out. He was murderously angry and he wasn’t looking at the camera anymore, at Ryan, he was staring into Claire’s pretty face with all the compassion and hunger of a pit viper ready to strike. 

Ryan jumped up from his chair. “We’ve got to get her out of there,” he said. 

Turner stepped in front of him and Reilly moved to stop him as Parker looked around and said, “Not yet.”

Joe was going to _kill_ her. They weren’t getting anything useful out of him and if they left Claire in there much longer, he was going to kill her. He _wanted_ to kill her, it was obvious. 

“And the last question?” Joe asked. 

“I don’t know,” Claire said. 

“No, you know the question.”

“I don’t _know_ is my answer,” Claire snapped. She was suddenly angry herself and forgot to be afraid. “How could I love anyone after you? You _destroyed me, you son of a bitch_!” She shoved herself up from her chair and reached over to smack Joe’s face. The clap of it was sharp in the empty room, the slap hard enough to throw Joe off balance in his chair. “ _Where’s my son?!_ ” She swatted at him then, unable to land a blow as Joe put his hands up to keep her off. “Where’s Joey, you bastard?! Where is he--?!”

Joe’s arm shot out between her slapping hands and he grabbed her throat. She had leaned out over the table within his reach and he sat up straight in his chair, holding Claire by the neck in his hand. She gasped and gagged and Joe squeezed as he drew her face close to his.

“We need to get in there, damn it!” Ryan shouted, shoving Turner out of his way as Parker leapt to her feet. 

Ryan was almost running, nearly out of the room and into the hallway when he heard Joe, speaking softly in spite of Claire’s noisy struggles, the whine of the buzzer as the door was unlocked and the shouting of the guards stationed outside the interrogation room. “I will _always_ love you.”

Ryan didn’t pause, but he heard it. The words sank down into his brain, into his bones and echoed there and without speaking, without his volition, his heart answered; _Yes_.

**2003**

Claire took the baby with her and visited her mother one weekend. Joe spent the weekend with Ryan. Ryan still had to work, they still hadn’t caught the killer and bodies were still dropping. For some reason, the university remained open and classes were still held, though some parents with young, pretty girls enrolled there protested and a lot of young, pretty girls went home. Joe didn’t mind Ryan’s absences. He had papers to grade and books to read and New York was always awake. There were a hundred museums to visit and several fantastic libraries to get lost in. There was Central Park, squatting in the middle of Manhattan with buildings all around it like they were waiting for their opportunity to pounce. Some of Ryan’s work could be done at home and there were a couple of times when they both looked up from their computers after hours of typing and reading until their eyes were tired and caught the other one doing the same at the other end of the table. 

Sunday morning before Joe had to drive back to Virginia they had breakfast. Chocolate croissants--because Joe liked them--doughnuts and coffee from a café on the corner. 

“This is nice,” Joe said. He was looking out the windows at the street below. Taxis were lined up bumper to bumper at the red light and every one of them was laying on their horn. He popped a piece of croissant into his mouth and chewed, smiling to himself. “You know why Claire went to her mother’s this weekend?”

Ryan was relaxed in his chair, eating a raspberry filled doughnut and watching Joe watch the city below. He smiled and shook his head. “You guys had a fight?”

“Mhmm, yes. We did,” Joe said. He turned his head and looked at Ryan over the table. “It was about you.”

Ryan sat up. “What?”

“Oh, don’t worry, she doesn’t know it was about _you_ ,” Joe said. “But it was.”

“Joe, if your marriage is in trouble, we should stop,” Ryan said. He rested his elbows on the table and steepled his fingers under his chin. “You’ve got a baby. Your wife goes to see her mother after a fight, that’s not a good sign.”

Joe mirrored him, his elbows on the table, fingers together in front of his mouth. He smiled and tilted his head a little to one side. “Do you want to stop, hmm?” he asked. He lowered his voice to a whisper, “Do you want to surrender?”

No, he didn’t, and it was a stupid question because Joe _knew_ it, but it would be the right thing to do. Joe watched him and his lips curved up in an arrogant grin, mocking him: Ryan Hardy, trying do the right thing. Ryan Hardy, self-sacrificing and noble. 

Ryan looked away first. “No,” he said. 

Joe sat back with a sniff. “No, of course not. Do you know, Claire believes I _self-harm_. Isn’t that funny? She thinks all these scars are testimony of my secret turmoil and self-loathing. Marks of my past tragedies. My traumatic childhood. What do you think she believes all these new ones are?”

Ryan shook his head. “I don’t know. That you’re conflicted about your cheating ways?”

Joe sat forward again, both hands pointing at Ryan and an amused smile on his face. “Exactly,” he said. “It makes it easier for her to forgive me.”

“Jesus,” Ryan said. “And you… you like the attention.”

Joe didn’t answer, but his responding smile and the pleased look on his face was answer enough. 

“How does she explain the ones on your back?” Ryan asked. “The marks, hmm? Or the bites. She doesn’t think you _bite_ yourself does she? I never thought she was that stupid.”

“She’s not stupid at all,” Joe said, offended on Claire’s behalf. “That’s why she thinks I’m having an affair. I imagine she pictures you as some sort of Lycra and leather-clad dominatrix.” He laughed and picked up his coffee to sip. 

Ryan got up and paced away to the trash can in the kitchen to throw away his own empty coffee cup. It put some distance between them for a minute so he could think. 

He never really felt bad about what he had with Joe except when Joe brought it up like that. Joe didn’t do it because Claire’s anger with him concerned him or worried him; he did it because it made Ryan feel guilty and that guilt would gnaw at him for days after. It was his way of being there, in Ryan’s head, twisting the knife, when he couldn’t _be there_. In an hour, maybe two, Joe would have to leave him there and drive home, return to his suspicious wife and their infant son and pretend that he had done nothing more risqué than catch up on work all weekend long. There were more cuts along his ribcage, old wounds reopened and new ones added to them, and they would keep Ryan fresh in his mind for days. He could press against them whenever he wanted to remember and see Ryan astride him on the bed with the New York City nightlights coming through the windows, touching his face with red and green and yellow light, those healing cuts throbbing hotly. Ryan’s own body carried no physical wounds at the moment, so Joe cultivated the seeds of his guilt instead, watched them sprout and left them to bloom in his absence. 

Joe came up behind Ryan as he was standing at the sink and rested his chin on his shoulder. “Are you angry now?”

“No,” Ryan said. He sighed and closed his eyes as Joe lightly set his teeth against the side of his neck. “What would _you_ do if your wife was the one having the affair?”

“I’d congratulate her and commend her on her rather auspicious timing.”

Ryan laughed and turned his head to kiss him. Joe crowded him up against the counter as he kissed him back and Ryan moaned. He broke the kiss with a bite to his lips. Joe made a pleased sound in his throat and sucked his puffy bottom lip into his mouth. 

“Do you know what it feels like to be the other woman?” Ryan asked. 

Joe nuzzled the back of his neck and nipped him lightly. “Ryan, you’re _not_ the other woman. Haven’t you realized that yet?”

Ryan had had a very good argument ready about how, other than being dangerous to his career and Joe’s marriage, other than being reckless, fucking him made him feel cheap and mean. It made him feel like the weapon Joe used to cause Clair harm, to wound her in a way that a knife never could. He never forgot that it was an _affair_ , by its very nature only a temporary diversion from both of their lives, something that would leave Ryan wounded and bleeding in a gutter when it was over. He could feel himself hurtling toward his own destruction every time Joe laid his hands on him. It was Joe who would make it out of this thing alive if anyone did. 

The entire argument died in his throat and he slumped back against Joe. “I give up,” he said. 

Joe clicked his tongue against the back of his teeth, scolding him. _Tsk, tsk, tsk, Ryan._ “Already?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I know what you mean.” Joe dropped a quick kiss to his shoulder and stood away from him. “Unfortunately, it’s time for me to go.”

Claire’s plane didn’t get in until that afternoon, but Joe wanted to go home and mess up the house a little so that it would look lived-in before she saw it. It wouldn’t convince her that he hadn’t been out fooling around with his mistress while she was away, but it might go a long way toward preventing another argument. Joe liked violence and he didn’t mind conflict, but he detested being shouted at and accused of things, even when the accusations were true. 

He packed his things and got his coat and spent several minutes kissing Ryan in the doorway before he finally tore himself away from him and left. Ryan watched until he was at the end of the hallway, then went back inside and shut the door. 

He stripped the sheets off his bed and started the laundry. There was blood on most of the linens he owned anymore and he had stopped throwing them out. He stuffed them into the washer, poured some bleach in the water and left it at that. 

He found one of Joe’s ties on the floor under his bed while he was remaking it. It was hunter green silk. Ryan sat down on the bed, the fitted sheet still rumpled and untucked on the mattress, and held it. He rubbed the material between his fingers and thought about Claire. The guilt Joe had planted in him was still there and it rose up to the surface immediately, but more and more, the guilt was slipping away, fading into the background. It was being replaced by cold, hard resentment; green-eyed envy.


	6. VI.

I would say that chess has more to do with the art of murder than it does with the art of war.

_Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Flanders Panel_

After Claire was attacked, after Ryan saved her, after he talked to Joe and let him gloat for a while before rubbing his face in the fact that his plan hadn’t gone quite according to plan and Jordy was still alive, Ryan went back to Claire’s place and sat in the chair beside her bed until she fell asleep. She trusted him and was comforted by him because he was the hero, Joe’s big damn hero, and she thought he loved her. He let her think it and sat there until she was asleep, then he sat there a little longer, just thinking.

He was trying very hard to be compassionate, to be patient, to empathize. Joe was making it into a game and Ryan could feel himself waking up. He had a purpose, he felt alive for the first time in years. It was Joe. Like Parker had said earlier, it was Joe making him feel his life. Not for the first time, but again. He was trying to be the good guy though. He was trying to remember that it wasn’t really a game, it was a life, many lives, people dying. It was Claire’s missing son and he was supposed to care about that. 

It was what the hero in the story was supposed to do. 

The hero in the story cared about the fate of the missing child, he took the hand of the damsel in distress when she needed comfort, he never doubted his mission and he absolutely, never _ever_ fell in love with the villain. The knight in shining armor didn’t love the dragon, he slew it and cut off its head, put it on a pike and paraded it through the city. Ryan’s armor was bent and twisted like the knocked-together armor of Don Quixote, his helmet was an old iron bowl, his sword a brittle tree branch. A more inadequate hero would have been difficult to find. His only saving grace was that he was perfectly willing to kill all the little monsters following in Joe’s wake. 

But not Joe. 

If they killed him for what he had done, he would certainly deserve it, but Ryan wouldn’t be there. He couldn’t. Not even, like some character in a movie bursting with compassion and forgiveness, for Joe’s sake. He couldn’t even be there so that Joe would have someone there when he died who didn’t hate him. It would kill him. If Joe hadn’t thrown everything into chaos, he would have been executed in less than a month, and Ryan could have lived with that if he didn’t have to see it happen. He’d had almost ten years to accept it and had let Joe die in his mind a long time ago. He didn’t answer his letters because he didn’t read them. He couldn’t bring himself to throw them away or burn them, so they piled up in a shoebox he kept under his bed, but for the sake of his own sanity, he dared not read them. Now, he wasn’t sure anymore. Joe had dragged him back in, pulled him back into his orbit and it wasn’t counting down the days anymore. He was alive again for Ryan like he hadn’t been in a long time. When this was over, he was going to have to start killing him in his mind and in his heart all over again.

He went back to the detention center and demanded to see Joe again. Debra Parker had gone to the motel to catch some sleep over two hours earlier and they didn’t want to call and wake her. Ryan was working with her and the guards knew him, so they assumed it was official business. They went to wake up Joe for him. 

Four guards went ahead of him into the interrogation room again and Joe was sitting there waiting for him again. He looked annoyed, but not like he had been sleeping. 

“You know sleep deprivation is an illegal form of torture in this country, don’t you?” Joe asked. When Ryan didn’t reply, he sighed and sat forward, his elbows on the table. “Didn’t I just see you? Be careful, Ryan, you’ll wear out your welcome.”

“Or they’ll think we’re in love,” Ryan said with a wry smirk. 

Joe let out a surprised bark of laughter. “I did stab you in the heart, I suppose that does make a statement if one considers it in a certain light.”

Ryan sat down across from him, nearly falling into the chair. He was exhausted, but for some reason he could also feel himself relaxing in Joe’s presence. “I shot you. In the back. What kind of statement does that make?”

“Oh, a few not very subtle ones, but the most obvious thing it says about you is that your aim is rubbish,” Joe said. “You got me in the shoulder.”

“I was aiming for your shoulder,” Ryan said. 

“Did you know Claire threatened me with divorce before?” Joe said, changing the subject abruptly as he had a habit of doing. “We got through it that time. I think we can get through it again. It won’t be easy. It’ll take real work. Real commitment. But I think so.”

Ryan raised an eyebrow at him and just let him talk. It was all nonsense, but maybe he had a point in there somewhere and maybe, if Ryan was patient, he’d get to it. 

“She suspected me of being unfaithful,” Joe said, frowning. “This was after my son was born.” Joe sat forward on his elbows and crooked a finger at Ryan, beckoning him to lean toward him. Ryan obliged and Joe smiled. “I was unfaithful, Ryan,” he confessed, staring into Ryan’s eyes to gauge his reaction. “I was unfaithful in my body, in my heart… in my soul.” He lowered his voice to a whisper that would not be overheard by the guards or the camera above their heads recording the conversation. “But you know something? I don’t think she ever knew it was _you_ and I… I’ll never tell.”

“Why not?” Ryan asked. “All you’d have to do is tell someone about it and you’d ruin me. This would all be over. No one would even have to die.”

Joe frowned, his brow furrowing, his expression one of bewilderment and surprise. “Why would I want that?” When Ryan didn’t answer him, he sat back, disappointed. “You still don’t get it do you? Don’t you feel alive, Ryan? Don’t you feel the excitement, the drive, the desperation and danger filling you up with purpose?”

Ryan shook his head. “This is you. This is all you, Joe. You can stop it whenever you want.”

“Oh, don’t I know it,” Joe said. He leaned back over the table again, peering into Ryan’s face. “Do you know what I was reading just now before they dragged me in here to perform for you like some trained billy goat?”

“I’m sorry. I can leave and let you get back to it,” Ryan said. 

He started to stand, but Joe’s hand shot out and seized his wrist to stop him. Two of the guards started forward, but Ryan waved them back and they reluctantly went back to their places by the door. Joe paid them no attention at all and stared up at Ryan until he settled back down in his chair.

“What’s your hurry?” Joe asked. His index finger was softly, surreptitiously stroking over Ryan’s pulse. “I’m already here. We might as well talk. You certainly don’t look like you’re sleeping, am I right?”

“Not much,” Ryan admitted. He twisted his wrist out of Joe’s grasp and put his hands in his lap. “What were you reading?”

“ _Ulalume_ ,” Joe said. “Well, not reading it so much as reciting it while looking at the words on the page. Do you know it?”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “I know it.”

It was one of Joe’s favorite poems.

“I could recite it for you,” Joe murmured. “If you don’t remember.”

“No, I remember,” Ryan said. 

“I suppose you read a lot of Poe when you were trying to catch me, didn’t you, Ryan?”

“Yeah. Thanks for that, Joe.”

Joe grinned. “You have such lovely eyes, Ryan,” he said. “If you were a woman, I would have cut them out years ago.”

Ryan blinked in surprise, then sat forward and put his elbows on the table, ran his hands through his hair with a sigh. “You want to kill me, Joe? Is that what this is all about?”

“That’s not what this is about at all, but yes, I do. Very much,” Joe said. “I’ve wanted to kill you since the first time I saw you. That being the case, can you guess why you’re still alive?”

“I’m gonna say it’s not my pretty eyes,” Ryan said. 

“Because I can only kill you once,” Joe said. “An unfortunate law of the physical world that has stayed my hand all these years. I would enjoy it immensely, but then you’d be dead, and I think, like most highs, the come down would be rather devastating.”

“And then where would you get your fix?” Ryan said. 

“Precisely,” Joe said. 

“You did stab me in the heart,” Ryan reminded him. “I nearly died then.”

“Yes, but you _didn’t_ ,” Joe said, becoming a little agitated. He shifted in his seat and looked away. “I never did apologize for that. It was a… a mistake.”

“I didn’t want to be right about you, you know,” Ryan said. While they were tossing around apologies, he figured he should add his to the pile. “I hoped I wasn’t. That’s why I was there that night.”

“Oh, I know,” Joe said dismissively. “I read your book, remember? You did embellish things a bit, but you got that in there and made it quite clear.”

“I thought you hated my book.”

“I do hate your book. Still, if anyone is going to make a buck off my story, I suppose it ought to be you.”

“That’s not why I--”

“I don’t _care_ ,” Joe said. “I don’t care why. We’re writing a new one. It’s time to move on and put it behind us, don’t you think? Let’s don’t dwell on it now.”

“It really upset you,” Ryan realized. 

“Of course not,” Joe said. 

He was lying. Ryan knew all of his tells, but even if he hadn’t, Joe wasn’t concealing it well. Maybe it wasn’t the entire book, but something he had written had upset Joe more than a little. Not enough to plan this game, the creation of his sequel, or organize himself a cult, perhaps, but enough that he didn’t want to talk about it. 

“It was as true as I could make it,” Ryan said. 

Joe glared at him. “Not true enough,” he hissed. “How bad would it be, do you think, if I told the world _our_ story?”

“Oh,” Ryan said. 

Of course. That was why it made him so mad. Ryan had completely removed anything about his personal involvement with Joe Carroll, outside of his brief consultation on the case about literature, from the story. Ryan couldn’t have done anything else unless he wanted to get himself arrested right along with Joe. After reading about _that_ , no one would have believed that Ryan didn’t already know Joe was the killer he was looking for. Maybe the law wouldn’t have seen it that way, but in the public mind, he would have been Joe’s accomplice. The sensationalism of it would have sold a lot of books, but Ryan hadn’t been trying to write a more brutal version of _Fifty Shades of Gray_ and it had never been about money.

“As I said, we won’t dwell on it,” Joe said. “You should go. Get some sleep. Tomorrow’s another day. Who knows how busy you might be.”

Ryan let out a tired breath and pushed his chair back. “I imagine you’ve got some idea.”

“Yes, but I can’t _tell_ you,” Joe said. “That would spoil it.”

Ryan was bone tired anyway. He got up and started to leave. The buzzer sounded as the door was unlocked and one of the guards opened it for him. 

“Don’t drink too much tonight, Ryan,” Joe cautioned. “I’d hate for someone to kill you. I might have to grieve. Wouldn’t that be something?”

“Someone other than you, you mean?” Ryan asked, looking back over his shoulder. 

“Well, of course if anyone’s _going_ to kill you, I want that person to be me,” Joe said. “But that doesn’t make you safe. Don’t ever think it. Stray bullets kill people all the time. Stray knives aren’t much more reliable. You should know that better than anybody.”

“Goodnight, Joe,” Ryan said. 

“Sleep well, Ryan,” Joe called. “Please do sleep well. It’s very important!”

The next day started with Edgar Allan Poe setting a book critic on fire. Things mostly got weirder after that.

Debra wouldn’t let Ryan talk to Joe, said she’d do it herself because it was time for them to meet, all the while watching him like she had something else on her mind. Ryan knew she had watched the tape of his conversation with Joe the night before. He knew that she wouldn’t get anything out of it, except maybe a sense of their intimacy, but nothing she could point a finger at. Just enough to raise her suspicions and have her taking the seat across from Joe in his stead. 

Joe wouldn’t talk to her. Ryan could have told her so, but she wouldn’t have listened, just like she hadn’t listened when he tried to warn her not to put Claire in the interrogation room with him. He doubted Joe would try to kill her. He didn’t care about Debra Parker, but she could be useful. She might let herself be useful if she imagined it would get her some answers. Ryan didn’t say anything. He let Parker find it out for herself. It was the only way some people ever learned.

Joe ended up using Parker to talk to Ryan, to tease him and mock him, and Parker left the interrogation room fuming. She found Ryan in her office and shut the door a little harder than necessary to get his attention. 

“I don’t know what the hell just happened in there,” she said. 

“He’s not going to talk to you,” Ryan said. “You’re wasting your time.”

“He’s what I’ve _got_ right now and he may not be talking, but you’re keeping some big secrets from me, Ryan.” Parker paced into the room. “You came back here last night and talked to him. Why?”

Ryan put the book he had been flipping through down and glanced up at her. “Couldn’t sleep.”

“Drink some NyQuil,” Parker said. “Why did you come back here to speak with Joe Carroll? Did you honestly think I wouldn’t know?”

“I honestly didn’t care if you did,” Ryan said. “Look, he’ll talk to me. He’ll spend a little time jerking me around, but he’ll talk to me. He’s not going to talk to you.”

“Or anyone else, it seems like,” Parker said. “In over nine years, he’s never cooperated with a therapist, he’s docile with the guards, but he doesn’t engage them in conversation, he--”

“Except for Jordy,” Ryan said. “But that was different.”

“Why was that different?”

“You heard him; Jordy’s a halfwit. Useful, easily molded, easily directed, very short half-life.”

“Shelf-life,” Parker corrected. 

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “What did I say?” Distracted, he moved some files and papers on Parker’s desk and found what he was looking for. His book. “You want me to stop talking to him, is that what’s bothering you?”

“No, what’s bothering me is the _way_ he talks to you,” she said. “The way you talk to him. You went to court every single day when Joe was on trial. You want to tell me about that? Maybe about _why_?”

“Nope.” He ran his finger down the contents page of the book, trying to remember where he’d put it. He hadn’t read the thing since the final draft.

Parker was glaring at him, but he wasn’t paying attention. Finally she sighed. “What are you doing?”

“Looking for--Here it is. Okay, so three people responsible for Joe’s downfall…”

“According to him. That would be you, I guess. Then obviously the dead critic, and who?”

“This guy. He was a professor at the university. I interviewed him,” Ryan said, flipping through pages. “He was a dean. After Joe’s book failed, this guy denied him tenure. Said that Joe wasn’t worthy. It was a big blow to his career.” He turned the book around for Parker to look. “Phillip Barnes, dean of literature.”

Parker sighed, then pointed at him. “We’re not done with this conversation.”

“Yeah, well let’s finish it later then,” Ryan said. He tossed the copy of his book back down on the desk. “Let’s go. Rick Kester’s got a head start.”

**2003**

Ryan had a few really bad days and was told to take a day off before he cracked. Joe cancelled one of his afternoon classes and they drove to Petersburg. There was an open house showing of a huge Gothic Revival mansion and on impulse they went. They ate canapés, drank cheap rosé champagne, and amused each other by pretending to be that sweet old harmless gay couple whenever the realtor started to ask questions. She went away smiling, charmed by them.

“Could you pick these locks?” Joe asked Ryan as he was examining a piece of toast with caviar. He sniffed it, deemed it edible, and ate it. He noticed Ryan watching him with lifted brows and shrugged. “I mean the front door, let’s say.”

“I’ve got lock picks, sure,” Ryan said. 

“Excellent.”

“It would be illegal for several reasons, including the lock picks.”

“Even better.”

“Joe,” Ryan said, “what are you up to?”

Joe lowered his voice and leaned in close to him. “There’s an enormous bed upstairs with a wrought-iron headboard that’s giving me exciting and salacious ideas.”

“Like what?” Ryan asked. 

Joe smiled. “They involve your handcuffs. You did bring your handcuffs, didn’t you?”

“I have a set in the car,” Ryan said. He looked up the winding staircase, then back at Joe. “Tonight. When everyone’s gone.”

“See, I like that; how we think alike,” Joe said. 

“You like that, huh?” Ryan said. 

He leaned in toward Joe and kissed him, surprising him. They were in public and playing like a gay couple was one thing; making out at a posh open house in a mansion that conservatively cost more than their combined life incomes in front of twenty wealthy, uptight prospective buyers was something else. It wasn’t something Ryan Hardy would have done six months earlier. It took Joe a moment to catch up, but once he did, he took Ryan’s face in his hands and kissed him back.

“I think we should leave these nice people to their second-rate caviar and go get a couple of _real_ drinks,” Joe said, stepping back. “Hmm?”

“Yeah, I could go for a drink,” Ryan said. A few of the other people there to see the house were trying--and failing--to not stare at them. “Any minute, someone’s going to come over here and apologize and ask us to leave or buy the house.”

“Then we should definitely leave,” Joe said. He took another flute of champagne from a passing waiter’s tray and drank it. “It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here. Let’s go.”

They went to lunch, had a few beers with their food and talked. They talked about Ryan’s serial killer case for a little while, about Joe’s classes, his book. There had been a scathing review of _The Gothic Sea_ from some well-known and respected literary critic in the New York Times. Joe tried to play it off like he usually did, but Ryan could tell that he was angry. 

The sun had just started to set, darkening to gold and painting the clouds salmon pink and red when they made their way back to the mansion. Joe stood lookout around the side of the house while Ryan picked the lock on the back entrance. It was the door that led into the kitchens and utility room. The lock was easier to pick than the one on the front doors, which were thick and heavy enough to stop a battering ram. 

Joe had the flashlight and once the door was open, he led the way. Ryan made sure the door was closed behind them and followed him through the kitchen. There was a hallway on the other side that looked pretty much the same both directions. Joe went left and Ryan followed him. For some reason Joe changed his mind, turned back and they nearly ran into each other. 

“You have no idea where we are, do you?” Ryan asked him. 

Joe looked both ways, then smiled. “I think it’s back that way.”

“I’m starting to feel really stupid for agreeing to this,” Ryan said. 

He followed Joe back down the hallway and they came out into a wide-open foyer with high, vaulted ceilings bathed in fading light from the windows with their pointed arches casting shapes like arrowheads over the floor and up the walls. The staircase they remembered from the open house curved up on the right and disappeared. There were bat-winged angels at the bottom of each banister watching them with faces that were beautiful and somehow sad. 

“Did you bring the handcuffs?” Joe asked.

Ryan reached around and took them out of his back pocket. He flipped them by one cuff on a finger and raised his eyebrows at him. “You want to handcuff me to that bed, don’t you?”

“I’ve thought about little else all afternoon,” Joe agreed. 

He snatched the cuffs out of Ryan’s hand at the same time Ryan took the flashlight from him and they went up the stairs, their footsteps echoing in the big, empty house as they ran up them two at a time. When they reached the fourth and top floor, there was still light enough coming through the windows to see by, but the house didn’t have good natural lighting. Ryan hit the lights to the staircase on his way up. They didn’t want to turn the lights on in the rooms and draw attention. The house was supposed to be empty and a realtor wouldn’t be there so late in the evening. Who knew how nosy the neighbors could be. The lights in the stairwell were enough. Their glow reached faintly into the master bedroom like candlelight. 

The current owners of the mansion had left a lot of their furniture inside as well as the curtains and bed linens while the house was being shown. There were flowers in a vase on the dresser near a window seat on the far wall. The curtains were pulled and someone had forgotten to close the window, so the soft, sheer white under curtains billowed faintly in the breeze. The bed sat in the middle of the room, its amazing headboard against the wall, twisting to a point only inches from the ceiling. It loomed over the rest of the room and looked to Ryan like a cross between a bed stolen from the bedroom of the Marquis de Sade and a torture device from the Spanish Inquisition. Of course Joe would love it. 

Ryan sat on the end of the bed and unbuttoned his shirt as Joe entered the room behind him and crossed the floor to him. Ryan leaned back on his hands and gazed up at him as Joe stepped between his legs. Most of his face was in shadow, but Ryan could see his teeth when he smiled. 

Joe dropped the handcuffs on the bed beside Ryan and knelt on the floor. He untied Ryan’s shoes and took off his socks one at a time. When they were gone, Joe ran his hands up Ryan’s legs to the back of his knees and pushed him back as he stood. Ryan scooted back on the bed toward the headboard as Joe got on the mattress on his knees and started to crawl, urging him back along the bed. He retrieved the handcuffs and when he had Ryan at the top of the bed, took his wrists in his hands and pushed his hands up until the back of them touched the iron. Ryan didn’t resist it, but he stretched out his neck to kiss Joe and Joe fumbled a little before he got a cuff on one of Ryan’s wrists and managed to get the chain looped through the twisted iron. With a flick and a sound like a zipper being drawn, Joe closed the second one around Ryan’s other wrist and let him go.

Ryan sighed and relaxed back against the pillows stacked up at the head of the bed and watched Joe as he sat back on his heels to admire him. Joe was still fully clothed, but as he ran his eyes over Ryan, he removed his jacket, put it aside and pulled his tie loose. He stopped there, reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out a little pack of his cigarillos and a flip top book of matches. He lit one and threw the rest off the bed on top of the pile of his jacket.

“I can tell you’re really into this little bondage fantasy of yours,” Ryan said dryly. “You’re already stopping to have a smoke.”

Joe looked at him through the smoke of his cigar and smirked. Very slowly, deliberately, he leaned over Ryan and exhaled smoke against his chest. It washed over him like foxfire fog over water and Ryan couldn’t help inhaling the sweet scent of the tobacco. Then Joe rested the hot tip of the cigar against his stomach and Ryan tensed and cried out in surprise. 

“Joe, what--?”

“Shh, be still,” Joe said. 

He didn’t put the cigar out on him, just rolled the hot coal over Ryan’s skin, lightly burning him, but also teasing him with the heat of it so that he never knew when it would sting. It made Ryan twitch and jerk, often in anticipation of pain rather than pain itself. 

“Do you remember you told me about your family?” Joe asked. He took a drag off the cigar, exhaled and lightly ran his fingernail back and forth over a tiny burn he’d made over Ryan’s bellybutton. “Your mother, your brother… your father? You remember?”

Ryan hissed a pained breath through his teeth. “Yeah, of course I remember.”

Joe pinched the little burn between his thumb and fingers and smiled when Ryan moaned and squirmed on the bed. Joe stretched out on the bed between Ryan’s legs and looked up the length of his body to meet his eyes. “You called it a curse,” he said. He put the tip of the cigar to Ryan’s stomach just above his belt buckle and held it there while it smoldered. “I want to hear about it.”

“I already told you,” Ryan said. He clenched his hands into fists and bit his bottom lip, holding in cries of pain or any urge he had to ask Joe to stop. He _would_ stop if Ryan wanted him to, he didn’t doubt that. He trusted Joe or he never would have let him handcuff him to the gaudy bed at all. “I told you… what happened. I… why do you want to hear it again?”

“Because it’s very interesting, Ryan,” Joe said. He flicked at the end of his cigar with his finger, trying to get rid of a little scrap of Ryan’s skin that was making it hiss. “Especially your father. Tell me about it.”

“He was a cop,” Ryan said.

“And what else?” 

Joe puffed on his cigar a few times to get the cherry burning again. Ryan felt himself trembling and heard it in his voice when he spoke. 

“He got shot. Some junkie in a convenience store just… just shot him.”

“And you were there.”

“Yes.”

As if to reward him for his candor, Joe ducked his head and rested the hot tip of the cigar to Ryan’s chest just below his nipple and inhaled deeply while it was there. The cherry flared as he drew on it and burned him. It burned and the burn seemed to grow, go deeper as Joe sucked on it. The orange glow cast his features into sharp contrast, gave him a demonic appearance. The pain was intense, his body lit up with sparks of pleasure. Ryan screamed and arched up from the bed, rocking his pelvis against him as Joe finally took it away, exhaling smoke through his nose. He ran the flat of his hand up the inside crease of Ryan’s pants, soothing him, and Ryan moaned, sure he was going to come like that and embarrass them both.

He didn’t and Joe let him catch his breath. “What else?” he asked. 

Ryan shuddered and closed his eyes, breathing deeply. “There was nothing else. He just died.”

“No,” Joe said. He put the cigar back to Ryan’s belly and held it there lightly. It was hot, not burning him but the promise of it was clear. “No one _just_ dies, Ryan. What else happened?”

Ryan squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “Why are you doing this, Joe?”

Joe shifted up on the bed, sliding up Ryan’s body, and licked into the hollow of his throat, up to nip the curve of his jaw. Ryan kept his eyes closed and Joe bit him a little harder until he opened them and looked back at him. The dark wasn’t absolute and he could see Joe in the moonlight from the windows, the light filtering in from the hallway and the glow of his cigar. 

“What did you do, Ryan?” Joe asked. “When you saw your daddy lying there, bleeding out, hmm? He _was_ still alive, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. 

Joe felt between them and unfastened the button of Ryan’s pants. He worked the zipper down and slipped his hand inside, his fingers flat and his palm pressing down over his pubic bone, into the crease of his thigh. Ryan shifted, squirming to push against his hand, but Joe denied him. 

“Did you watch it?” Joe asked. 

Ryan didn’t know what he wanted to hear or _why_ he was pushing this. “Joe, stop it,” he said. “This is sick. Just… get off me. I don’t want to do this.”

Joe’s teeth flashed in the dark as he smiled. “Then say the words, Ryan.”

“This has nothing to do with that,” Ryan said. He pulled himself up against the headboard until he could sit with his back against it and get out from under Joe. “The key’s in my pocket.”

“You say the words and then we’re done,” Joe said. “Until then…” He reached up and crushed his cigar out on the front of Ryan’s left shoulder. Ryan cried out in surprise at the sudden, deep pain and pulled his hands uselessly against the cuffs. “Until then, why don’t you tell me what you did while your father lay dying.”

Ryan growled at him through clenched teeth, but instead of saying the words that would get him released, he said, “I watched, okay? That what you want to hear? I watched him die. He was on the floor, the floor was this light colored tile, maybe even white, and his blood looked too red to be real and there was a lot of it and I watched him bleed out.”

“You didn’t try to help him or cry or anything?” Joe asked. 

“No, I just watched. He was staring up at me, then he was just staring past me and then nothing. He was just gone. And it wouldn’t have mattered. I couldn’t have helped him. No one could.”

“Maybe not,” Joe said. He lit a match and the light flared briefly between the tip of it and the little cigar as he relit it. “Maybe no one could, but you know, most anyone would have tried anyway. That’s human nature. What did you think while you were watching it?”

“I don’t know,” Ryan said. “I don’t know what I thought. I didn’t think anything. I’d never seen anyone die before.”

“It’s not as dramatic as they make it out to be, is it?” Joe asked. 

Ryan narrowed his eyes suspiciously, a little alarm going off in the back of his mind. “What do you mean?”

“I mean they just die,” Joe said. “In books, in movies, in stories they always go out reluctantly, clinging to life, professing love or granting forgiveness with their dying breath. Cursing their killer or cursing God. In reality, they don’t do that so much. People die pretty easily and they don’t make a grand exit. They just walk off the stage.”

He wasn’t being maudlin, he was just talking, like he was remembering something. It was more philosophy than sentiment. 

“Who died on you?” Ryan asked.

“Ah-ah, that’s not how this works,” Joe said. “When I’m the one in the handcuffs, you get to ask the tough questions. It’s my turn.”

Ryan sighed. “There’s nothing else to tell. You want to let me go now?”

“No,” Joe said, crawling up the bed to him. He put his cigar in his mouth and ran his hands up the insides of Ryan’s spread legs. “I want you to tell me about it again,” he said around the end of the cigarillo. 

He took it out of his mouth and held the hot tip close to Ryan’s throat. Ryan swallowed, waiting for the burn, but Joe moved his hand down over his chest without touching him with it, the coal hovering over his skin as he stroked his hand down Ryan’s chest, his stomach, the inseam of his trousers. Ryan groaned in frustration and arched his back, pulling uselessly against his restraints. 

“Tell me again,” Joe whispered in his ear. “Tell me all of it.”

So Ryan did. He told him about his father again, his breath panting as he spoke, hitching as Joe went down on his stomach on the bed and kissed, licked, bit and burned his way down Ryan’s body. The cigarillo burned down and went out and Joe tossed the end aside. He found the burns he had made in Ryan’s skin by touch in the dark and dug his fingers into them, made them leak plasma over Ryan’s skin, made Ryan’s voice go high and strained around his words as he fought not to scream. 

He lost that fight. Joe sucked his cock into his mouth, held Ryan’s hips down and dug the nails of his thumbs into burns over his hipbones. Ryan forgot the story he was telling, the pain and pleasure of it commingling inside him, driving even the memory of it out of his mind. He wanted to reach for Joe, twist his fingers in his hair and hold onto him, but he couldn’t lower his hands. Instead, he grabbed onto a twisted bar of iron in the headboard and held onto that. Joe didn’t mind that Ryan had stopped telling his story. He teased him a little, drawing it out, making Ryan beg. When Ryan came, he swallowed and laughed a little at the tired way Ryan begged him to stop. 

Joe let him go and wiped his bottom lip with a finger in a way that was somehow both fastidious and lewd. “Ryan?”

“What?” 

“I have something to confess.”

“What?” Ryan lifted his head and peered into the dark, trying to see his face. He could make out Joe’s form and his face, but not the expression on it. “What confession? Why?”

“Last night, Claire came to me. She said she wants to try again. She wants to make our marriage work,” Joe said. He was still lying propped up between Ryan’s legs and leaned to the side to rest his head on his thigh. “We made love.”

Ryan held his breath, feeling like he’d been punched in the stomach. “No.”

“She’s a very sweet woman, my Claire. The love of my life, you might say.”

“Stop,” Ryan hissed. 

“And she’s so beautiful. She forgave me. She--”

“Stop _talking_. I don’t care, Joe. Unlock these cuffs _right now_.”

The pain was a surprise. He knew he was in love with Joe, had known it for a while, but the pain was still a surprise. The anger that quickly followed was not. 

“Ryan, you have to understand, I never made you any promises. Claire’s my wife. I’ve taken vows with her. She’s the mother of my son. We--”

Ryan drew a leg up and kicked him. He caught Joe with his heel in the chest close to his shoulder and Joe coughed involuntarily at the impact and cursed. He pushed himself up and barely managed to block it when Ryan kicked him again. 

“I don’t give a _shit_. You get the fucking key to these cuffs out of my pocket and let me go _right now_ , Joe,” he shouted. “You motherfucker, I am warning you. I swear to God, if you don’t let me go, I’ll fucking kill you, I’ll--”

Joe was on his knees with his head down and Ryan couldn’t see his face, so it took him a minute to realize that he was laughing. He sat up, still laughing and shook his hair back from his face. Ryan glared at him and shook the cuffs. 

“You’re lying,” he realized. 

“Of course I’m lying,” Joe said. 

“Unlock these cuffs,” Ryan insisted. He wasn’t shouting anymore and his anger had reduced to a simmer, but it was still there. “Why lie to me about that? For _fun_? It’s a joke to you? A game?”

“Because it hurts,” Joe said simply. He wasn’t laughing anymore, but he didn’t take the key from Ryan’s pocket to unlock him either. He got off the bed and stood beside it, looking down at him as he started to undress. “Doesn’t it?”

“Joe,” Ryan said, his tone a clear warning. 

Joe was unbuttoning his shirt, but he leaned over him to speak softly in his ear. “Didn’t it hurt? Then, just as bad as it hurt… it’s gone now and it feels… that much better, doesn’t it? To know you’re still the one?”

“I’m serious, Joe, let me go,” Ryan said. “ _Now_.”

Joe dropped his shirt, stepped out of his shoes and unfastened his belt. “Say the words first. I want to hear them.”

Ryan gritted his teeth and jerked his wrists against the handcuffs. They clanged on the iron. “I surrender,” he said. “I surrender, now let me go.”

“Yes,” Joe said. He felt in Ryan’s pocket for the key and unlocked the cuffs. 

When his wrists were free, Ryan sat there for a minute, rubbing them. He flexed his fingers, then before Joe knew what was coming, he hit him. Joe’s stomach was hard, but he wasn’t prepared for it and Ryan could hit hard and he was mad enough that he didn’t even feel it. He leapt off the bed as Joe staggered back a step and shoved him. Joe knocked into a small table and it crashed to the floor. Then Ryan was pushing his back against the wall, trapping him there with his body. He took Joe’s throat in his hand and squeezed, just a little, just enough to let Joe know he wasn’t screwing around. 

“You were lying?” Ryan asked. 

“I was lying,” Joe agreed. “Ryan--”

Ryan growled at him and squeezed his throat. Joe coughed and fell silent. “The love of your life?” he whispered. There was a jeering note of contempt in his voice that he didn’t even try to disguise. “So beautiful and sweet, hmm?”

“Ryan--”

“Were you lying to me then or are you lying to me now, Joe?”

A soft, taunting smile appeared on Joe’s face. “What do you think?”

Ryan leaned in, his face so close to Joe’s that he could feel his breath on his mouth. “That isn’t a game you want to play with me right now.”

“I haven’t touched her,” Joe said. “I don’t _want_ to touch her. Is that what you want to hear? Are you satisfied?”

“Is it true?”

“It’s true.”

Ryan cupped Joe’s face in his hands and kissed him. Joe responded immediately and began to relax. Ryan stepped back, pulling Joe away from the wall back to the bed. When they reached it, he broke the kiss, grabbed Joe and shoved him down on it. Joe lay back on the bed, propped on his elbows and watched Ryan throw his shirt on the floor.

“What are you going to do?” he asked. He wasn’t afraid, just curious. 

Ryan finished undressing and didn’t answer him. He got on the bed and crawled over him and Joe leaned up to meet him halfway when Ryan ducked his head to kiss him. There was bite in the kiss and it drew a moan from Joe. Ryan ran a hand up the back of Joe’s neck, pet his fingers through his hair, then fisted his hand and pulled his head back, baring his throat. Ryan grazed his teeth along the slope of his neck, over his shoulder, lightly nipped him, then sat back. 

“Turn around,” he said. When Joe didn’t immediately comply, he released the hold he had on his hair and pushed him. “Roll over.” 

Joe hesitated a moment more, then rolled onto his hands and knees. “This possessive streak of yours runs a little deeper than I expected,” he said. 

Ryan leaned over him. “Yeah?” he said in his ear. “What were you expecting?”

“It’s not a criticism, merely an observation,” Joe assured him. 

“Sure, Joe,” Ryan said. “Put your hands behind your back.”

Joe tensed and turned his head to look at him over his shoulder. “Excuse me?”

“Put your hands behind your back,” Ryan repeated with slow emphasis. “Now.” Joe didn’t move. “Or say the words,” Ryan said.

He was offering him an out, but Joe didn’t take it. He put his hands behind his back. Ryan held them at the wrist and snapped the handcuffs on him. When they were on, Joe’s hands together at the small of his back, Ryan pushed him down on the bed on his stomach. Joe turned his head to the side, trying to watch over his shoulder, but it was dark and Ryan was out of his field of vision. 

“Ryan? Don’t you dare leave me here like this,” Joe said.

Ryan leaned over him and kissed the back of his shoulder. “I’m not going to leave you,” he mumbled into his skin. 

He lightly bit over the spot he’d kissed and slowly pushed a finger inside him. Joe caught his breath, then relaxed beneath him, seeming almost relieved. He spread his legs and sighed as Ryan added a second finger and thrust them. When Ryan pushed his cock inside him, he brought Joe to his knees and pulled him down onto him. Joe pressed his forehead to the mattress and bit his lip, moaning deep in his throat at the aching, slow penetration. He couldn’t help or make Ryan hurry or even move very much with his arms locked behind his back, and as Ryan started to fuck him, all he could do was take it. Joe liked that more than Ryan had expected him to and he went slow just to draw it out, though Joe begged him to go faster. Watching, feeling and hearing Joe come undone was a thrill of its own and Ryan had already had an orgasm, he could stand to wait. 

Joe was shaking, covered in sweat and goosebumps with Ryan biting his shoulder bloody when he came and his cries echoed down the hallways of the vast, empty house. Only then did Ryan quicken his pace. 

When it was over, Joe lay folded over his knees and slumped on the bed, unmoving, catching his breath while Ryan lazily kissed his shoulders and licked away the blood from the bite he’d put there. Ryan unlocked the cuffs and Joe stretched his arms over his head, flexed his wrists and groaned at the easing tension between his shoulders. He continued to lay there for a while, until Ryan stopped kissing him, then rolled onto his back.

“I like this bed,” Joe said. 

Ryan snorted laughter and shook his head. “This bed looks like it belongs in a bondage museum. Or a shitty vampire movie.”

“That’s a contrary statement,” Joe said. “Aren’t all vampire movies shitty?”

“I liked _Dracula_. The one with Gary Oldman,” Ryan said. “ _Interview With a Vampire_ was pretty cool. All the new ones are shit though.”

“I stand corrected; all vampire movies but _two_ ,” Joe said, smiling. “And most of the books.”

“All of the books,” Ryan said. 

“The deterioration of literature and the written word is very sad to me,” Joe said.

“Yeah, no one appreciates good writing anymore,” Ryan said. The conversation amused him, mostly because they were having it in a strange bed in a strange house mere minutes after having sex that included both bondage and some very vampiric behavior on Ryan’s part.

“They don’t,” Joe agreed. “Some of my students don’t even know how to write in anything but childish print. Still more of them actually incorporate numbers into their writing. Tell me something, how bloody difficult is it to write out the word ‘to’ or ‘for’?”

“How about ‘L-O-L’? Or ‘O-M-G’? That’s my personal favorite.” Ryan said. “That show up in any term papers yet?”

“Not to my recollection, thank God,” Joe said. He pushed himself up on his elbows. “We should get a hotel room for the night.”

“We could just stay here,” Ryan said. “Get up a little early and be out of here before anyone shows up.”

“I don’t think so,” Joe said, sitting up. He leaned over, picked up Ryan’s shirt off the floor and tossed it in his face. “Get dressed. I want a shower.”  
 


	7. VII.

...And occasionally, when I feel like it, I tear little girls apart.  
And from now till kingdom come the only thing you can  
count on in your existence is never understanding why.

_Gabriel the angel, The Prophesy_

Phillip Barnes died. His corpse still had the dumbfounded look of surprise he had been wearing in his last moments when Ryan saw him. It was similar to the look on Rick Kester’s pie face when Ryan shot him. Of them all, Maggie was the only one who died with any dignity, with a knife in her hand and snarl on her face. 

Now Ryan owed Mike Weston his life. It was annoying, but it couldn’t have been avoided. The kid had saved his life when Maggie went off-script and Ryan suspected that meant he was going to have to start being a little nicer to him. 

He went to tell Claire about the lead they had on Joey thanks to Maggie and Claire looked at him with her big, sad blue eyes and pleaded with him to stay. To eat breakfast. To let her worm her way back into his life because she loved the man she thought he was. Ryan couldn’t do it. Let Joe play his game with her if he wanted, but he couldn’t do it. Claire had never been the point and he doubted, in spite of Joe’s declarations of love for her, if it was about her even now. Claire was the rope in their game of tug-o-war; you have to have a rope to play the game, but the game isn’t _about_ the rope. 

Ryan left Claire and went back to see Joe. He hadn’t slept in over 36 hours and he had nearly died not that long ago from Maggie’s magnets, so he was exhausted and still feeling a little woozy. He was going to have to go back to the motel and try to get some sleep soon or he’d just collapse. First, he needed to see Joe. 

Parker didn’t want to let him. “You haven’t slept in nearly two days, Ryan. Look at you. You almost died last night. You don’t have to do this. We’ve got it. Go get some rest.”

“I’ll go after I talk to him,” Ryan insisted. 

“What the hell is going on with you and Joe Carroll?” Parker demanded, crossing her arms over her breasts. “There’s something I’m not seeing, but I’m going to figure it out.” She jerked her head to the side in a nod down the hallway. “Go on and talk to him. Make it quick. You look ready to fall over in a strong wind.”

Ryan went. Maybe she would figure it out. Parker had looked at him funny after Reilly was killed and it was only later that he realized “seduce” had probably been the wrong word to use about the effect Joe Carroll had had on him. It came with obvious sexual connotations. Then again, he should have just kept his mouth shut because everything he had said to her while standing there was enough to put up some big red flags. Hell, if he was Parker, he’d be suspicious of him, too. Still, Ryan was having a hard time getting too worked up about the idea at this late date. If the FBI knew about his real relationship to Joe, he’d be off the case no matter how much they might need him, but they couldn’t arrest him for fucking the guy ten years ago and Ryan didn’t really need them the way they needed him. If they threw him out and barred the door, he’d just go home and get back to drinking himself to death. He doubted Joe would allow that to happen though. 

Four officers were waiting for him outside the interrogation room when Ryan got there. They went in ahead of him and stood by the door. Joe was relaxed in his seat, sleepy and irritated at being awakened so early and dragged to this room on Ryan’s whim. 

“Just because you don’t sleep at all doesn’t mean you have to ruin it for the rest of us,” Joe said. He yawned. “You look wretched, by the way.”

“You look like you’re doing just fine,” Ryan said. 

Joe made a scoffing sound of amusement and looked down at himself. “You think so? I personally believe they use orange on these things because it doesn’t look good on _anyone_. Myself included.”

“I nearly died last night, Joe.”

Joe’s head snapped up and his eyes narrowed. “What?”

Ryan walked to the table and stood beside the chair across from him. “What, that’s not part of the plan?”

“Of course not. I can’t torture you if you’re dead, Ryan.”

“Of course not.”

“You’re lying.”

Ryan sat down. “You know I’m not.”

Joe put his arms on the table and leaned in a little, studying him. “What happened?”

“Resourceful little Maggie. She kidnapped my sister, threatened to kill her, made me trade myself for her instead--”

“Which you certainly did because you’re a noble-minded idiot,” Joe hissed. “Is she dead? You killed her, didn’t you?”

Ryan shook his head. “Not me, but yeah, she’s dead.”

Joe sat back and cocked his head a little to one side thoughtfully. After a minute, he said, “I’m not going to be here much longer, Ryan. I’m going to miss these little visits.”

Ryan frowned and sat forward. “What do you mean? You going somewhere, Joe?”

“Ah, now that might be a theological discussion we don’t really have time for,” Joe said. At the look of surprise on Ryan’s face, he chuffed a soft laugh and shook his head. “You don’t think any of this means they _won’t _still kill me, do you? Because they’re still just as ready as ever to stick that needle in my arm. Are you going to be there? To watch? See the conclusion of your triumph against evil?”__

__“No,” Ryan said._ _

__“What, they won’t let you watch? That doesn’t seem fair. I’m allowed to invite someone and I wouldn’t want to deprive you. You really need some closure, Ryan.”_ _

__“I’ve got a reserved seat, I just won’t be there.”_ _

__Joe sat forward again, a look of real interest on his face. “Why? If our positions were reversed, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”_ _

__“I’m not you.”_ _

__“We’re not as different as you like to imagine.”_ _

__“I’m not like you, Joe.”_ _

__Joe made a dismissive gesture with one hand and slumped back in his chair. “We’ll see, won’t we?” he asked. “Do you think if they kill me, my death with exonerate you, hmm?”_ _

__“No,” Ryan said with a sigh. He didn’t know why he did this to himself, but even with Joe sitting there trying to twist the knife into his heart with his words, he felt a little better than he had away from him. “No, I don’t think so. I’m not looking for forgiveness.”_ _

__“Well, that’s good, because you won’t get it from me,” Joe said._ _

__Ryan rolled his eyes. “Okay, Joe.”_ _

__“Make no mistake, wiping me out of existence will _not_ make me disappear. I’ll live forever… right--” he sat forward and tapped Ryan’s forehead with his index finger “--here.”_ _

__The guards shifted uneasily, but when Joe didn’t touch him again or grab for him and Ryan didn’t even flinch, they settled back into their places._ _

__“Killing me will not redeem you,” Joe said. “Especially not if you don’t even do the wicked deed yourself.”_ _

__“I never wanted to kill you, Joe,” Ryan said softly._ _

__“Then you should have stayed home that night,” Joe whispered back. “My mark is on you now, Ryan. Like the mark of Cain, it’ll never wash off.”_ _

__Ryan stood up and turned to leave. In small doses, Joe did give him some peace and make him feel better just by being near him. In larger doses, he had a way of making Ryan regret that he had ever known him._ _

__“Farewell, Ryan. Perhaps we’ll have time to talk again before I go,” Joe said. “Do try to get some rest. I cannot stress enough how very badly you will need it in the days to come. What kind of hero are you going to make in the state you’re in now? You’ve always been thin, but you’re looking positively skeletal these days.”_ _

__“Goodbye, Joe,” Ryan said._ _

__“And haggard,” Joe added as Ryan walked out the door.  
_ _

Ryan went back to the motel. He badly wanted a drink, but he didn’t stop to get one and drove straight there. Maggie had almost got him. He couldn’t afford to be off his game, so he was going to have to sober up, like it or not. 

He set the alarm on the clock by the bed to wake him in four and a half hours. Then he laid there for twenty minutes and stared at the ceiling. He got up and paced at the foot of the bed, torn between what he wanted--needed--and his conscience. 

In the end, his conscience lost.

Ryan went to the cubbyhole closet, opened his suitcase and took out the box of tapes. He opened it, selected one at random and changed it for the Sarah Fuller tape he had listened to a few nights before. 

Joe’s voice filled the room as Ryan stretched out on his stomach on the bed to listen and closed his eyes. He slipped a hand between his body and the bed, into his briefs and touched himself. Joe’s voice filled his mind, reawakened memories of his hands on him, his body against him, the slope of his back, the soft rumble of his laughter.

“Hello, sweetheart,” Joe said. “Tell me your name.” A long silence was followed by Joe’s sigh. “Well, if you’d rather not, I understand, but this isn’t the sort of thing that should be done anonymously. We’re going to be very, very close in a minute, you and I. As close as two people can be. As close as mother and child.”

A girl sobbed. “Please, Professor Carroll. Please don’t. Let me go. I won’t tell anybody. I promise I won’t. I promise--”

“Shhhhhhhhhhh, none of that,” Joe said softly. 

“Eleanor,” the girl said. “I’m Eleanor. Please, don’t hurt me. I want to go home.”

“We all want to go home, don’t we?” Joe asked. “Now, look at me. Look right here. Keep looking…”

Eleanor screamed. Under her screams, the sound of wet, cutting flesh could be heard, the drip of blood and Joe’s panting, excited breaths. The girl’s screams echoed, sometimes drowning him out, but Joe had kept the recorder in his pocket. It picked up most of his sounds as well as the voice of his victim. He moaned and stopped cutting long enough that the girl tried to plead with him again, but he wasn’t listening. She had ceased to be a person to him or relevant outside of his own desires the moment he decided to kill her. 

He moaned again and Ryan stroked himself, his own moans muffled as he bit his bottom lip. Even the girl’s screaming turned him on as he imagined Joe there, what he was doing to her, blood coating him up past the wrist, his body alive with pleasure at her pain and the power of it. There would be a moment near the end where Eleanor would look back at him, maybe right before he carved her eyes out, and the knowledge of her own death would be on her face.

“Yes,” Joe gasped. The girl’s screams were winding down, fading as she faded, becoming almost sexual themselves as the life drained out of her. “Yes, yes,” Joe panted. He moaned, then growled it between his clenched teeth, “ _Yes_.”

Ryan shuddered on the bed and came, his orgasm rolling through him like a sickness. On the tape, Joe laughed softly and drew in a deep breath. Ryan rolled onto his back, shaking, and threw an arm over his eyes as he waited for his breathing to even out. While he was lying there, the tape clicked off. 

As he was drifting off to sleep, Joe’s voice whispered in his mind, a cold, reptilian slither:

_Does this hurt?_

_Would you like me to go deeper?_

**2003**

Eleven girls dead and Ryan was no closer to catching their murderer than he had been a year ago. It sometimes felt like he was farther away from knowing the truth than he’d ever been before and this guy would go on and on forever. Girls would keep being slaughtered, their eyes cut out of their faces, their bodies arranged in… what? He had thought there was a tableau element to their deaths, something artistic and romantic, but no one agreed with him, not even the shrinks the department brought in to help with the profile. He had been forced to put that theory aside. 

The accepted profile sounded like something read out of a textbook to him and that was not the way they were going to catch this guy. He was smart. They might _never_ catch him. Ryan didn’t dare say that aloud to anyone though. He had already been warned several times and told that he was getting too close. Maybe they were right; maybe he was too close to see the whole picture. He _admired_ this killer. He wasn’t supposed to admire the monsters. It was dangerous to admire your enemy; everyone knew that. Maybe it was why fourteen months after the first body had been found he still didn’t have a clue. He waited for another body to turn up and hoped every time to find something he could use, but there was never anything the killer didn’t want them to have. 

It was past midnight and he was still working, though the words he was reading sometimes blurred and they had all stopped making much sense to him an hour ago. There were files and photographs spread out on his bed, more photographs tacked up on the wall, and he was sitting on the floor reading a report from the first officer on the scene of the latest murder for what was probably the twenty-fifth time. 

There was a knock on his door. Ryan looked up and rubbed his eyes with finger and thumb. They felt gritty with lack of sleep, painful from staring at bunched together text all day long. 

“Who is it?” he called. 

As an answer, the knock came again. 

Ryan sighed, tossed what he had been reading down and got up to answer it. 

It was Joe and the moment the door was open, he grabbed Ryan and backed him into the apartment, his mouth on him, biting his lips in his impatience for Ryan to open his mouth. He did and Joe’s tongue was there, licking over his teeth, stroking his tongue and the roof of his mouth as he backed Ryan up to the wall. He pushed his body flush against him, pressed him into the wall and held him there. He was hard and ground against him, making throaty, wanting sounds that hummed along their tongues and down Ryan’s throat. 

Ryan finally managed to break the kiss and turn his head away, but Joe’s mouth just made its biting, sucking way down his neck. Gasping, catching Joe’s urgency, Ryan reached out, caught the door and slammed it shut. When it was closed, he put his arms around Joe’s neck and pulled him back into the apartment. Joe followed him, then caught him around the waist and hauled him into the room, over to the bed.

They made it to the bed, but Joe pushed Ryan down to the floor at the foot of it and lay over him. The glossy photos and well-read reports and file folders were spread out beneath him and Joe snatched up a picture, looked at it, then flicked it aside. 

Ryan helped him with his shirt while Joe was fumbling to get his belt open. A button popped off and went pinging across the room. Ryan’s own clothes were easier to get out of. He had been working at home all day in sweats and a T-shirt. With a few tugs and pulls, he was naked. Joe’s fingers inside him weren’t gentle, he was rough in his haste and Ryan flinched and hissed at him to be careful. Then he was inside him, no lubricant and very little preparation, and Ryan cried out and clung to his shoulders. He could feel Joe’s cock inside him opening him up as he pushed deeper and deeper in and it ached, but something about it felt good, too. Good in a way that set him on fire with pleasure. Part of it was Joe’s urgency, that desperate, demanding need to hurry and take and not wait for it. It filled him up and he caught it like a virus, responding with his own urgency and demand by grabbing, biting his mouth when they kissed and wrapping himself around Joe tight. That hunger passed between them and grew until it blotted out the rest of the world. 

Ryan’s back slid in the paper and photographs on the floor as Joe fucked him, pushing him up on the floor, the paper making a rustling sound like dry autumn leaves. Above Joe’s head on the wall were more pictures of dead girls, their eyes carved from their faces, their bodies arranged with care. He stared at them as pleasure pulsed through him and he suddenly saw their beauty as he hadn’t before. Joe sank his teeth into the curve of his shoulder and moaned, the hum of it sliding down Ryan’s spine, down to the pit of his stomach, and he saw the ferocious power in those pictures; in the man who wasn’t there. 

“They’re beautiful,” Ryan whispered. 

Joe slowed his pace and lifted his head to look at him. “What?”

Ryan tightened his legs around his waist and arched his back, rocking up against him. “Don’t _stop_ ,” he panted. “Joe. Don’t stop.”

Joe slipped an arm around him, hefting his weight to hold him against him. His other arm he rested on the floor to brace himself, his hand tangled in the back of Ryan’s hair. He hunched his shoulders and threw his weight behind his thrusts. The sweat on their bodies made their skin slide together and the paper on the floor stick to Ryan’s back like glue. Ryan cried out and gasped, his eyes drifting over Joe’s shoulder to the pictures on the wall. 

Joe came first and moaned into the side of Ryan’s neck. He pinched the tender skin there between his teeth and didn’t stop moving. He fucked him through the last of his own orgasm and felt between them to wrap his hand around Ryan’s cock when he couldn’t keep going. Ryan was already close. Joe squeezed him and pumped his hand a little and he came, mouth open and gasping, fingers biting into Joe’s back. 

“Jesus,” Ryan breathed. He let his head fall back on the floor with a soft thump and laughed. “What the hell was that?”

“Spontaneous combustion,” Joe muttered in his ear. 

Ryan laughed and a few seconds later Joe laughed with him. Joe picked his head up and kissed him, slow and lazy now, taking his time. Ryan hummed appreciatively and broke the kiss to lay his head back down. On the wall behind Joe, the eyeless faces of the dead girls looked back at him and he felt watched, but not judged. They seemed almost serene in their poses. 

“I think I’m starting to get it,” Ryan said. 

“Starting to get what?” Joe asked. He moved off of him and lay on his side beside him. 

“The girls.” Ryan pointed to the wall and Joe turned his head to look. “I’m starting to see what he sees.”

“Are you, now?” Joe asked. He smiled and pressed a kiss to Ryan’s shoulder. “And what does he see?”

“They’re more beautiful that way.”

Joe picked his head up and stared at him in surprise. “Ryan, they’re dead.”

“I know, but forget about that for a minute,” Ryan said, gesturing at the photos. “Just look.”

Joe sat up and looked at the wall. He didn’t seem to find them repulsive or very disturbing, but then he had seen some of them before when Ryan consulted him. He just looked for a long time, then sighed and lay back on the floor next to Ryan, propped on his elbows. There was a soft smile on his face when he looked down at him again. 

“You admire him,” he said. “Your killer.”

“Sometimes,” Ryan agreed. “Don’t tell anybody. I’d be eyeballs-deep in shit if anyone ever heard me say it. Sometimes though, yeah.”

“Why?”

“Well, he’s brilliant.” Ryan chuffed a soft laugh and pushed himself up on his elbows beside Joe. “And lucky. He’s very lucky. But it’s not all luck. There’s real genius in what he does. In _how_ he does it. We may never catch him. He might just get bored one day and stop.”

“Do you even want to catch him?” Joe asked. 

“Yeah, I mean… sure, I want to catch him,” Ryan said. “I just don’t know if I will.” He looked away from the pictures and leaned over to bump Joe’s shoulder with his own. “I’d like to meet him. That’s another secret you can’t tell anybody.”

“You’ve got a crush,” Joe said, teasing him. “That’s so cute. Dangerous, too, I imagine.”

Ryan lightly shoved him, making Joe rock to the side, laughing. “Shut up, I do not.”

“That’s probably for the best,” Joe said. “He’d only kill you and cut out your eyes and make a spectacle of your corpse.”

“Nah, I’m not his type,” Ryan said, gesturing up at the pictures again. “He’s into girls.”

Joe turned against Ryan’s side and nipped his shoulder, grazed his teeth up to his ear. “Maybe he’d make an exception for you, Agent Hardy. You’re his… What do they call the villains in comic books?”

“Nemesis,” Ryan said, amused. “Arch-nemesis.”

“Yes. His arch-nemesis, that’s what you are,” Joe said. “I’m sure he’d _love_ to get his hands on you. You’d be quite the masterpiece. A beautiful picture for a wall like this one.”

Ryan stroked a hand down Joe’s back and let him nip and lick at his throat. If he had a hickey there the next day, he’d have to wear a turtleneck into the office, but he didn’t mind. 

“Joe, what happened?” he asked. 

“Nothing. What makes you think anything happened?” Joe asked. 

“Well, let’s see; middle of the night, you show up and, without so much as a ‘how you doing’… here we are. It’s not an illogical assumption that something’s happened.”

“Was I too rough with you?”

“No, that’s not… Joe, what’s going on?” Ryan shifted to sit up and Joe had to move off him again. “It can’t have been that spontaneous. It’s a long drive from Richmond and don’t you have classes tomorrow?”

“Yes, well, they’re in the afternoon,” Joe said. “It was a long drive, but I wanted to see you and well… you’re here.”

“That’s sweet, but why?”

Joe looked annoyed. “I just did.”

“Bad day?”

“Not really.”

“Did you fight with your wife?”

“No, I… I can’t just want to see you for no particular reason?”

“Sure, but if you just wanted to see me, I don’t think you’d have come in the door like that and… there’s usually a little more warning.”

Joe snorted. “It was rather abrupt.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But you’re very accommodating. I’ll have to keep that in mind.”

“You are _not_ going to make a habit of charging through my door and throwing me down on the floor,” Ryan said, but he was laughing. 

Joe shook his head and tried to look serious. “No, of course not, people would talk.”

Ryan got up from the floor, wincing. There was a photograph stuck to his back, He pulled it off and tossed it aside. “Fine, you don’t have to tell me what happened,” he said. He looked at the papers and photographs on the floor, now crumpled, wadded up, torn and wet in places. “God, what a mess. You want a shower? I want a shower.” He put his hands down for Joe to take and helped him up. “Come on.”

They showered together and after, while they were both still wet and dripping water on the floor, Ryan warmed some soup on the stove, which they ate sitting in his bed naked as they watched the perpetual traffic jam outside on the street. Joe told him that Claire was going to be out of town most of the next week, and when Ryan asked him where she was going, he confessed that he didn’t know. He didn’t seem very upset about it.

He stayed the night and was curled up against Ryan’s side with his breath puffing warmly against Ryan’s arm when the phone beside the bed rang and woke them both up a little after 6:00 a.m. Ryan groaned and reached over to pick up the receiver without opening his eyes. When he did open them, he found Joe watching him, his expression one of sleepy irritation. He was smiling to himself when he answered the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hardy?”

It was FBI Director Franklin. Ryan sat up at attention. “Sir? Yes, sir.”

“Get your ass back to Richmond, Hardy,” Franklin said, sounding weary. “We’ve got another body.”

“What? When?”

“We won’t know an exact time until the coroner’s report, but initial examination of the body suggests sometime early last night, between seven and ten.”

“Shit,” Ryan muttered. He rubbed his eyes and nodded. “All right. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Yeah, well, hurry. There’ll be a chopper waiting.”

A chopper meant he would probably be flying in with other agents and they wanted him there fast. Ryan climbed out of bed, still holding the phone. “I will. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Franklin hung up without a goodbye. He wasn’t much for pleasantries and this case was a problem. It was putting a lot of stress on everybody and the Bureau was catching hell from Washington and every other corner of the nation about it. They usually kept serial killer cases under wraps to cut back on the sensationalism they caused and all the distractions, but this killer hadn’t allowed for that. He was theatrical. Maybe he didn’t want to get caught per se, but he definitely liked the attention. 

“What’s wrong?” Joe asked. 

Ryan put the phone back in the cradle. “I have to go. There’s another girl. It happened last night. They’re flying me to Virginia.”

Joe groaned and buried his face in his pillow for a few seconds. “Christ, it’s too early for a call like that,” he muttered. He sat up and raked his hands through his hair. 

“You can stay,” Ryan said. “Sleep a couple more hours. Just lock up.”

Joe eyed him thoughtfully over his shoulder, then shook his head. “I’m awake now. It’s a long drive. I’ll head back.” He got his pants off the floor and pulled them on. “Besides, you’ll be in town. You know where to find me.”

They got dressed and said goodbye at the door; Joe took the elevator and Ryan took the stairs. He drove to the field office and endured some irritable bitching from the helicopter pilot about his tardiness before they took off. 

The dead girl’s name was Eleanor Price. She was another student at Winslow University. Just like the others, her eyes had been cut out of her head with surgical precision while she was still alive, then she had been stabbed, the knife entering her abdomen on the left, puncturing the splenic artery. The official cause of death was exsanguination: she had bled to death. Not before she had suffered terribly, but in the end, her death itself had been relatively painless. The coroner narrowed the time of death down to between 8:00 and 8:45 p.m. 

Just enough time to drive from Richmond to Brooklyn and arrive a little after midnight.


	8. VIII.

"It is my nature."

_The Scorpion and the Frog_

Ryan got a little drunk after the events in Duchess County. It seemed like the thing to do and though he didn’t feel he could be blamed for it, he probably would be if anyone knew. He bought some mints at the gas station on his way in to work and tried to convince himself that he didn’t smell like boozy sweat. The shakes he could do nothing about, except sneak a sip every once in awhile to settle his nerves.

After they left Claire and went back to the Federal Detention Center, Parker tried for a second time to get Joe to talk to her, this time about Charlie and this Roderick guy Claire had mentioned, but Joe was even less cooperative than the last time. She tried flattery again, tried appealing to his ego, which was massive— _it’s so brilliant how you created such an intricate dedicated cult of followers willing to kill for you from inside a prison cell, it’s just so amazing, tell me more about that, Joe…_ etcetera—but he said nothing. He stared at her like he was wondering how long it would take him to peel her skin off. Frustrated, she ordered him back to his cell.

Ryan had been watching it on a computer monitor. He was drinking from a bottled water when Parker stalked into the room, glaring. She ran a hand over the back of her neck and stood there like that, one hand on her hip, staring at nothing for a moment in thought. 

Finally she said, “That had better be water, Ryan.”

Ryan snorted and took a drink. As a matter of fact, it was, but he had another one that wasn’t water in his bag. He said, “What was the point of that?”

“Getting him to talk,” Parker said. “Obviously. They’re one step ahead of us all the time. I’m sick of it.”

“Well, you’re not going to learn anything from him,” Ryan said. 

“That’s right, because you’re the only one he talks to,” Parker said irritably. “Why is that, anyway, do you think? Why’s he so obsessed?”

Ryan shrugged. “No idea,” he lied. “Maybe he respects me for catching him. Maybe he’s just pissed I wrote a book about it. Maybe he’s psycho and I try not to get too caught up in why he thinks what he thinks about me or I’ll lose my mind.”

Parker just stared at him, disbelieving. “Right.”

“Look, it doesn’t matter why. He’s not going to talk to _you._ ”

“Why?”

“Haven’t you figured it out yet?” Ryan asked with a soft huff of laughter. “He doesn’t like women very much.”

Parker’s eyebrows lifted. “He was married to one for years. As far as we know, he kills women exclusively and—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ryan said dismissively,” Which is a reflection of his sexual preference in killers like him because the killing is sexual. I read those textbooks at the academy, too. I know. He likes looking at women, he fucks them, he finds them attractive and useful, but he doesn’t really _like_ them much.”

Parker frowned. “So, what are you saying?”

Ryan took another drink of water and turned to leave the room. “Don’t take it personally, that’s all.”

It was less than an hour later when he walked into Debra Parker’s office and found out they were transferring Joe to Georgia. He had been calmly surviving his hangover and trying not to draw attention to it, but this information startled him out of it. It was like being dunked in a tank of ice water. 

Joe’s attorney, Olivia Warren had been hanging around the past couple of days and he had suspected something was happening that wouldn’t mean anything good for Ryan or the FBI, but a transfer of all things made _no_ sense. Joe was up to something, the transfer was the curtain, not the drama itself. He knew that immediately and he couldn’t understand how no one else saw it. One cage was the same as another to Joe; this one was a little better, a little more tolerable because it allowed him occasional access to Ryan. There was no reason for him to request a transfer and the idea he would do it because Ryan had broken his fingers was fucking laughable. 

Joe had _liked_ it. Unless he had somehow changed his own wiring in the last ten years while they had been apart, he _still_ liked it. Ryan couldn’t very well explain that to the warden or to Parker though, and if he did, they would never believe him. He would sound like a crazy person—a desperate crazy person making excuses and grasping at straws. 

When he went in to see Joe before he was taken away, he got a minute alone and there was a moment, just a few seconds, when their eyes met and Ryan knew that Joe knew. He knew that Ryan knew he was up to something, that this transfer was never going to happen and soon he would be free again. Joe smiled at him and Ryan realized he was smiling back.

 _Do you have any friends, Ryan?_ Joe’s voice whispered in his mind. Joe stood there smiling at him, mocking, holding his silence and keeping their secret, the memory of it all there like a shout in his eyes. _I will be your friend._

“Every great love must be tested, after all,” Joe was saying. 

Talking about Claire again with Claire the furthest thing from either of their minds. 

Ryan pretended to misunderstand it. In his memory, he listened to Joe saying, _I will_ always _love you._

He couldn’t let Joe do this to him though. This was a game to him, _his_ game, the deck stacked in his favor, all the cards marked, and they were playing it with human lives. It was tearing him to pieces inside, but he couldn’t let Joe’s love matter here. Like he had done once before, he had to sacrifice him to save people and really, Joe had no one to blame for that but himself. _He_ had put Ryan in the role of the hero again. He couldn’t have possibly expected him to behave any differently than he had the last time. 

_I’ll get you again,_ he wanted to say, but did not. _I’ll catch you wherever you go. I won’t let you get away. Not with any of it._

Joe tilted his head back slightly, eyes flashing with understanding and challenge. 

The marshals returned to take him away and Joe leaned over as he passed and said softly, “Goodbye, Ryan.” The purr of his voice seemed to run over Ryan’s skin, awakening sense memories. He suppressed a shudder and swallowed.

He didn’t say goodbye. He was positive they would see each other again very soon.

**2003**

If he had been asked, Ryan could not have pointed to anything specific that made him start to suspect Joe. It was instinct mostly. Little things, coincidences and a deep down gut feeling that something was wrong. 

To his everlasting shame, he knew exactly why he had told himself he was wrong and rationalized away that gut feeling. He told himself that he still felt guilty, that he was looking for a reason to push away from Joe, that his uneasy suspicions were all in his head, his guilt about their relationship manifesting itself in his subconscious mind in a familiar way that placed them at odds and would make Joe an adversary—easier to walk away from. He didn’t really believe Joe was a murderer. It was impossible that the man Ryan had been hunting so many months was the same one in his bed. He could not be that blind. 

In truth, he loved him. It was as simple as that, and as complicated, and there was nothing rational about it. 

Joe loved him, too. He said so more than once and Ryan believed him. He risked everything by being with him. He hadn’t left his wife and Ryan had not asked him to, but they were closing in on a time when that choice would have to be made. It scared Ryan more than he liked to think about it because whether he loved him or not, Joe could choose Claire anyway. He could easily see it happening that way. They had been married many years, they had a baby son together; it was a lot to lose.

When they were together, Ryan didn’t bring it up. Joe didn’t even mention his family unless he was trying to deliberately upset him, but that didn’t work as well as it once had, so he hadn’t done it since shortly after their trip to Petersburg. Still, the fact of Claire and Joey was a troll squatting on the table between them that would soon have to be dealt with—one way or another. 

Claire still believed Joe was cheating on her, but she had stopped fighting with him about it. If Ryan and Joe didn’t address the problem soon themselves there was every chance Claire would solve it for them and leave. Joe suspected that she only stayed with him because of the boy and Ryan suspected he was right. They’d seemed happy. It must have felt like such a horrible betrayal when she realized they weren’t. 

On weekends, Joe stayed with Ryan at his apartment more and more often. If Ryan had to work away from home, he would return in the evening to find Joe grading papers at the kitchen table or Joe would insist they go out and they’d eat dinner, have a few drinks and return home to Ryan’s big bed. The bloodstained sheets and the dingy illumination of New York streetlights and perpetually loud city traffic completed the façade of their secluded world. 

Joe could make him forget about the eyeless girls like nothing and no one else could. Even when he began to wonder about him, Joe could make him forget. One minute he would be sweet and disgustingly romantic, the next he was sliding the fine edge of a straight razor along Ryan’s ribcage and Ryan _loved_ him. 

_Would you still love me if I killed you, Ryan?_

Nearly six months later, that was still true, but if Joe was the man killing all those girls, the one Ryan had been hunting, he didn’t think it would go on being true. He loved him enough that it would survive the idea of his own death, but all those others? He didn’t want Joe to be his killer, but the question would rise in his mind sometimes and he wondered about it. That Joe had asked it at all, that it had occurred to him, the tone of his voice as he asked it—anticipatory, hungry—and his ecstatic response to Ryan’s answer. To his unhesitating, _Yes_. 

“Joe?” Ryan asked. 

His sat astride Joe’s hips, his head was down as he slowly drew the blade of a knife down his back. The cut filled with blood and he pressed the tip of his thumb into it, smearing it and digging the nail in just to feel Joe shiver beneath him. His hands were tied together with soft rope, the rope caught around a rung of the headboard. Joe was naked from the waist up and as Ryan cut into him, he could see his skin twitch faintly, the muscles in his shoulders and back tensing. 

Joe turned his head to one side to look back at Ryan over his shoulder. Ryan smoothed his hands up his back, smearing blood over his shoulders like oil that he massaged into his skin. The pain of working his fingers and palms into the cuts made Joe moan and his lashes fluttered as his eyes fell closed. 

“Yes, Ryan?” he said. 

The question he had been going to ask died unspoken and Ryan leaned over him to breathe against the back of his ear, whispering, “Would you still love me if I killed you?”

Joe’s lips slowly curved in a smile that lit a small, hot fire in Ryan’s belly. “Oh, yes,” he whispered back. “Yes.”

Ryan set his teeth over the curve of Joe’s shoulder, lightly bit and sucked a kiss into his skin. He came away with the flavor of his blood in his mouth. “Good,” he said. 

“Why?” Joe asked. He was not alarmed, merely curious. “Is that what you’re intending to do?”

“No,” Ryan said. 

_Never._

Ryan got off of him and up from the bed and Joe followed him across the room with his eyes. He picked up his gun from the coffee table, removed it from the holster and walked back the bed. He stood beside the bed and looked down at Joe laying there, stretched out on his stomach, blood gathered in the hollow dip at the small of his back from all the cuts on either side of his spine and along the back of his shoulders and slid the clip out of the gun. 

Ryan preferred the knife to the razor because no matter how it was sharpened, it never cut as cleanly as a razor blade. There was always some bruising in the flesh around the wound, the cuts were always a little jagged because some of the skin tore before it was sliced. It hurt more as it was happening and he didn’t have to split Joe open to cause a lot of pain. 

The knife was lying on the bed with Joe. Ryan set the gun and clip on the nightstand and picked up the knife. Joe looked between the gun and Ryan, then watched Ryan lick the blade before setting it on the table, too. 

“Ryan—”

Ryan put a finger to his mouth and shushed him. “I’ll be right back,” he said. 

Ryan left him alone with the knife and gun beside him where he could see them. Where he _had_ to look at them and wonder and worry. He went into the bathroom and got the bottle of rubbing alcohol from under the sink, stopped in the kitchen to get a book of matches and returned to the bed again. 

Joe watched him apprehensively. “Ryan, what are you thinking?”

“Do you remember the slaughterhouse?” Ryan asked. He climbed back onto the bed and threw his leg over Joe to sit astride him again. “You remember I said I’d pay you back for it?”

Joe dropped his head down on the pillow and let out a deep sigh of breath. “I do recall something like that, yes.”

Ryan ran the fingers of his right hand up the back of Joe’s neck, fisted it in his hair and pulled his head up. “You can stop me,” he said. 

Joe laughed a little breathlessly and closed his eyes. “We’ll see,” he said.

Ryan let him go and immediately punched him hard in the side. Joe grunted in surprise, then he grew tense, his hands fisted against the ropes and he made a sound low in his throat like a growl. He did not, however, try to buck Ryan off and he did not say the words that would make him stop. So Ryan hit him again, the other side, hard enough to drive the wind out of him and make Joe gasp for breath. 

“I think you’re hiding something from me, Joe,” Ryan said. 

Joe coughed out a laugh. “Oh, yes? Is that what this is about? You’ve got some bottled up resentment you’re going to take out on me, is that it?”

Ryan rose to his knees and ran his hand up Joe’s spine, through the cuts and blood already gone tacky, and back down to rest it at the base of his spine. Joe shuddered beneath him. “Are you?” he asked. 

“Am I what?” Joe asked. 

Ryan hit him again, driving his fist into Joe’s side, knocking the breath out of him again. “Hiding something?”

When Joe could speak, he said, “Everyone has secrets, Ryan.”

Ryan leaned over him and breathed against the side of his neck, kissed just below his ear. “Tell me,” he said. 

“Tell you what?”

“Something. Anything. Tell me a secret.”

“I never wanted children,” Joe said. 

Ryan nipped his earlobe chidingly and sat back to punch him again. “That isn’t what I mean.”

Joe panted and shifted beneath him. “I guess you’ll just have to keep hitting me until I come up with something better then,” he said. “Though I’m rather enjoying your interrogation technique.”

Ryan sat back and reached over on the nightstand for the loaded gun clip and the knife. “What are you hiding from me, Joe?”

Joe didn’t answer. He lay there breathing deeply and said nothing. 

Ryan used the blade of the knife to pry the lead from a 9mm bullet. He sprinkled the tiny bit of powder inside the shell into the open mouth of a cut in the middle of Joe’s back. Joe hissed in a breath at the soft burn of it, but he didn’t speak. 

Ryan lit a match and touched it to the gunpowder. It sparked and ignited; a flash that was bright and quickly gone. Joe screamed and jerked under him. Ryan opened the rubbing alcohol and sloshed it over the cauterized cut. Joe shivered and pressed his face into the pillow to muffle his screams. Ryan watched him, listened to him and sucked his bottom lip between his teeth, so aroused by it that his breath became slightly labored. 

When Joe was quiet again and still, Ryan touched the burned cut. Joe trembled but he didn’t cry out at the touch. 

“Gunpowder can be poisonous,” he said. “That’s why the alcohol.”

“You’ve become quite the sadist,” Joe countered, his voice cracking a bit. “That’s why the alcohol, Ryan.”

“What are you hiding from me?” Ryan asked. 

“Would you believe me if I said ‘nothing’?”

Ryan pried the lead off another bullet. 

Joe coughed out a laugh. “Even if I were hiding something from you, you’re going about getting it out of me _all wrong_ ,” he said. “Go ahead. Light it. Go on.”

Ryan lit it. Flash, burn, the smell of cordite, the tang of alcohol and Joe bucked beneath him, biting the bed pillow against his screams. Ryan could still hear them deep down inside his chest; still felt the timbre of Joe’s voice vibrating in his thighs. Joe shook all over and moaned and when he could speak, he told him to do it again. 

Ryan did it again. He filled cut after cut with gunpowder and went through half a book of matches lighting them up. If Joe had any secrets, he didn’t offer them to him. He finally did beg for Ryan to stop, but he didn’t say the words, so Ryan didn’t. He ran out of bullets before he ran out of cuts and rather than get the box of ammo from his closet, he contented himself with bathing the rest of Joe’s wounds with the rest of the bottle of alcohol. 

They were both gasping for breath when he finally stopped and the silence after Joe had filled the room with agonized screams was profound. Ryan looked at the wounds, touched them lightly with his fingertips and knew that Joe would wear the scars on his back for the rest of his life. For the rest of his life, no matter where he went or what happened between them, if he took his shirt off, whoever he was with would see the marks and know that he belonged to someone else. To Ryan.

Ryan reached over Joe’s head and cut the rope. Joe didn’t move except to lower his arms to release the tension in his shoulders. It made him wince. 

Ryan pulled at Joe’s side and said, “Turn over.”

“Aren’t you finished?” Joe asked. He rolled over. The wounds on his back touching the cotton sheets made him hiss through his teeth in pain, though he regarded Ryan with sleepy, bedroom eyes and an expression of contentment. “I do so admire your creativity.”

Ryan shifted down the bed and opened the fly of Joe’s pants. Joe smiled at him and lifted his hips to assist when Ryan pulled them down. He threw them off the side of the bed and stood to take off his own pants. Naked, Ryan climbed back on the bed and lay down with Joe. He traced his fingertips over the scars on his chest, down his body to other scars, most of them now scars made my Ryan’s own hand. Joe rolled his eyes to the side to watch Ryan’s face as he touched him and shivered. 

“Does it still hurt?” Ryan asked. “Your back?”

“Of course it still bloody hurts,” Joe said.

Ryan smiled. “You want to stop?”

Joe raised his eyebrows. “What else did you have in mind?”

Ryan lowered his head to kiss the side of Joe’s mouth and Joe turned his face to catch the kiss and deepen it. He stopped and broke the kiss when Ryan closed his hand around his aroused cock and squeezed. Ryan pressed his mouth lightly to the side of his neck, kissed up to his ear, breathed in the smell of him; rubbing alcohol and gunpowder, blood and seared flesh while he began to move his hand. Joe moaned and turned his head, searching out Ryan’s mouth again to kiss him.

“Something’s happened,” Joe said. 

He turned on his side at Ryan’s urging so he could move up against his back. The touch of Ryan’s body on his burned and cut skin made him tense and tremble. Ryan ran his hand down Joe’s side, over the slopes of his body, the slight dip of his waist, the rise of his hip. Joe moaned as Ryan let his fingers linger to press against the bruises he had punched into Joe’s flesh along his ribs.

“You don’t trust me now,” Joe said. “Why?”

Ryan pushed a finger inside him and Joe shifted against him restlessly. “I don’t know,” he said. Ryan added a second finger and began to steadily thrust them. “It’s just this feeling.”

Joe drew breath through his nose and bit down on a groan of pleasure. “What sort of… of feeling?”

“A gut feeling.”

Joe laughed soft and breathless. He rolled his hips back into the thrust of Ryan’s fingers. “So, a cop feeling,” he said. “A cliché cop feeling. About me. How… _perverse_.”

Ryan twisted his fingers inside him and Joe choked, caught his breath and reached back to grab Ryan’s hip and pull him against him. Ryan pulled his fingers out of him and pushed the head of his cock inside. He slid into him slowly until Joe pressed back against him, his fingers digging insistently into Ryan’s hip, then Ryan thrust home just to hear Joe gasp and feel his body shake. The smell of alcohol was thick and acrid enough he could almost taste it and he pressed his mouth to Joe’s neck, high up by his ear to stay away from it. He caught Joe’s earlobe lightly in his teeth and held it as he began to move, strong, steady thrusts, taking his time, driving moans and grunts of mingled pain and pleasure from Joe that Ryan found unbearably arousing. 

“How does it feel?” Ryan murmured in his ear. He brought an arm around to pet his hand up Joe’s throat. “Joe?”

“You know,” Joe whispered. He closed his eyes as Ryan ground against him, hips pressing hard against his ass. “You know what… You know, Ryan.”

“You know what I mean,” Ryan said. He closed his fingers slightly against Joe’s neck, fingers biting in against the base of his throat. More of a threat than anything. “Tell me.”

“Hurts,” Joe said. He moaned. “It hurts.” 

Ryan’s dry skin, flesh breaking out in a light sweat, rubbing against the cuts and burns on Joe’s back had to be agony. Ryan knew it well; Joe had done it to him. Still, his pulse fluttered rapidly against Ryan’s fingertips and he knew Joe liked it. He knew his body and everything else about him well enough by that point that he would have known it just from the cadence of Joe’s voice. 

“Don’t stop,” Joe said. He gripped Ryan’s hip hard enough to make his arm shake and pulled. “Ryan, don’t. Don’t stop.”

“Oh, I’m not,” Ryan said. 

He tightened his fingers on Joe’s throat and squeezed. Joe’s back was pressed to his front from chest to hips and when Ryan thrust, it rocked them both and sent shocks of pain through Joe. With Ryan’s hand around his throat closing off most of his air, he jerked and choked and tried to breathe through his nose. Joe came like that, with Ryan’s fingers tight as iron bands around his throat, his body on fire with pain, rubbed raw with every thrust. 

Joe let his head rest back on Ryan’s shoulder and Ryan let go his throat to gently pet the bruises blossoming there. He kissed Joe’s lax mouth, his cheek, mouthed at his jaw as he fucked him, faster, harder, every moan and whimper building the fire higher. Ryan cried out against the back of Joe’s neck when his own orgasm sliced through him. Joe reached back again to grab him, pulling him in deep and ground back against his hips.

They lay like that, still pressed together and shaking until Ryan’s breath became even and his heartbeat slowed. Then he moved off the bed and left Joe resting while he went into the bathroom to start a bath for him. He set the water to warm rather than hot because the hot water would hurt the wounds on his back and the time for hurting him was done. Then he returned to the bed to help Joe. 

Unlike Ryan after the slaughterhouse, Joe didn’t curse him, though it was painful. He reserved his cursing for God. 

Ryan helped him wash his hair and cleaned his wounds. Then he helped him back to the bed where he applied antibiotic ointment to the worst cuts and burns and bandaged them. Joe was lying on his stomach, cheek resting on his folded arms and sleepy when Ryan finished and lay down beside him. 

“Do you know the poem _Ulalume_?” Joe asked. 

Ryan smiled and turned his head to look at him. “I don’t think so.”

“Do you ever think, if I _am_ hiding something from you, it’s because you’re not ready to know about it?”

“So, you’re protecting me, is that it?”

“I’m just saying, if I was lying to you, it might be for your own good.”

“ _Are_ you lying to me, Joe?”

“No.”

“But you’re not telling me something.”

“I’ve not told you many things, Ryan. I’m sure you have things you keep to yourself as well. Even from me.”

Ryan sighed. It was true enough. Especially in his line of work, there were some secrets that he tried not to even think too much about, let alone speak of. But Joe was not a federal agent, he was an English teacher. It wasn’t the same. 

“I don’t lie to you,” Ryan said. “I’ve told you things… things I don’t tell anybody.”

“I know,” Joe said. “Perhaps one day we’ll know _all_ of each other’s secrets.”

If Joe didn’t choose Claire, then perhaps so. Ryan did not mention Claire aloud though. He would not be _that_ guy. That nagging boyfriend type that he hated. He wouldn’t be that even for Joe. 

“Don’t be angry, Ryan.”

“I’m not,” Ryan said. He put his hand out and rested it on Joe’s back over the bandages and paper tape. “Why don’t you tell me the poem? I know you know it by heart.”

Joe chuffed laughter and made a sound of agreement in his throat. Softly, he began to recite, “The skies they were ashen and sober; the leaves they were crispéd and sere—the leaves they were withering and sere; it was night in the lonesome October of my most immemorial year…”


	9. IX.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for taking so long to finish this. I know I said it would be the next week and that was a few months ago. People have asked me about it since then. Unfortunately, real life got in the way as it has a habit of doing and I wasn't able to keep my word about that. This is going to be the final chapter of this story, which is long. Like novella length, really. I did not expect it to go on as long as it has, both on the paper and just in the time it's taken to write it, but here it is. Sadly, I will likely not write in this fandom again and this will be my second and last contribution. I have no interest in the show after what happened during season 3 and if it continues to a 4th season it doesn't seem like anything I would want to watch. I hope you enjoyed this story though. I know I've had some moments when I really enjoyed writing it

Tell me we’re dead and I’ll love you even more.

_Richard Siken_

 

“I’m done,” Ryan said. 

He had been saying it for the last ten minutes in response to everything Mike Weston and Debra Parker threw at him, but it was like he wasn’t even speaking. They talked over him, assuming he would listen and do what they wanted because it was Joe Carroll and he was Ryan Hardy. He was Batman to Joe’s Joker and he would _have to_ stay and fight. He would _have to_ assist in the search. He could not simply leave the fray. 

Except that was exactly what Ryan was going to do and as soon as Weston got the fuck out of his way he was getting on that elevator, by God. “Move,” he snapped. 

Weston cut off in the middle of what he was saying and stared at him. 

“I said I’m done,” Ryan repeated for what he hoped was the last time. “I’m here to consult. Joe escaped. For the _second time_ in what? A month? And I am fucking done. This… I can’t do it. It’s… I can’t. So get out of my way, Weston.”

Weston and Parker exchanged a look and neither of them moved. Then Parker nodded and Weston stepped aside. Exhausted, Ryan got on the elevator and left. 

He went home, locked himself in his apartment and got blind drunk. At some point the next morning, he got out the box of Joe’s unopened prison letters, all nine of them. Nine; one for every year he was behind bars awaiting execution. 

He held the first letter up to the light and tried to see through the envelope, but he couldn’t. He murmured a couple lines from _Ulalume_ under his breath as he worked his thumb under the seal, “These were days when my heart was volcanic as the scoriac rivers that roll…”

The yellow lined paper slipped out and Ryan unfolded it to see the words Joe had written to him nine years ago. What had he said? What _could_ he say that would have mattered then? Would it matter now?

It was blank. 

No, not blank. There was a spot in the middle. A dark spot of… He lifted the paper to his face and sniffed it, but there was no smell. Too old, too long inside the envelope. He flicked his tongue out to taste it. It tasted like musty paper and ink, but something else…

Blood. 

Ryan frowned at the spot of blood on the paper and considered its meaning. Joe liked his symbolism and it wasn’t often difficult to understand what he meant, but Ryan was devastatingly drunk. He didn’t get it. 

He opened the second letter. There were two spots of blood on the page. 

He opened all of them and they were all the same. Third letter; three spots. Ninth letter; nine spots. No words. None at all. Nothing. 

Ryan swept them all, letters and envelopes, off the bed and said, “Fuck you. Fuck you and the vaguely symbolic horse you rode in on, Joe.” He flopped back on the bed and raised a finger in the air to punctuate his point. “Which also doubles as a biohazard. That’s like… you in a nutshell, really.”

Joe had held a gun on him today. Held it so close to his face that Ryan could look right into the dark eye of the barrel and smell his own impending doom in the oily metal. He was so tired. So damn tired. And he’d thought, maybe Joe would really pull the trigger and it hadn’t scared him because he was so tired. If he did, then none of it would matter anymore. Love him or hate him, Joe Carroll wouldn’t be his problem anymore. 

Ryan wanted that. He was tired of hunting him. Tired of trying to catch him. Tired of thinking about killing him, of being presented the option because it wasn’t an option for him. If Joe kept on, Ryan would be presented with a moment when he would have to kill him and he _couldn’t_.

There was an abrupt and very loud knock at his door. It startled Ryan so badly he nearly fell out of the bed.

He pulled himself up and closed the bedroom door on the mess of Joe’s letters before he walked through the apartment to the door. He checked the peephole. 

It was Weston.

“Go away,” Ryan said through the door. 

“Ryan, let me in. Let’s talk about it, okay?” Weston said. 

“I can’t believe this,” Ryan muttered. 

He had picked up the fifth bottle of Grey Goose from his nightstand on his way out of the bedroom and still held it in one hand. He considered putting it somewhere for a moment, thinking maybe if he wasn’t clutching it then things wouldn’t really look as bad as they were when he opened the door. Then he said fuck it because, not only hadn’t he invited Weston to get on a plane or helicopter or Greyhound bus or whatever and come his ass all the way to Manhattan to bother him, he didn’t want him there.

He kept the bottle, but he also opened the door. 

“Whoa,” Weston said, looking him over. 

Ryan was wearing his boxer briefs and a hideous, though beloved terrycloth bathrobe and nothing else. His hair had not been combed, he had not showered or eaten anything since leaving Virginia, and he was pretty much hammered. He squinted at Weston trying to make the two of him come into focus as the one he knew was actually standing there. 

“Uh, can I come in?” Weston asked. 

Ryan snorted and stepped back, throwing the door open for him. “Sure, why not? Want a drink? A beer? Coffee… I’ll have to make it though.”

“No, thanks,” Weston said. He stood inside the door looking around the apartment with a mildly stunned expression. 

Ryan was both annoyed by his presence and amused by the expression on his face. He wanted very badly to not be judgmental about Ryan Hardy, his paper hero, but it looked like it was hard. He might not make it. 

“So, what do you want?” Ryan asked. He walked by him into the kitchen in search of a glass and some ice. Grey Goose was better with ice. 

“Well… can you put some pants on first?” Weston asked.

“How about no?” Ryan said. The ice clinked in the glass and he filled it to the top with vodka. “I’ll just have to take them off again when you leave, which is going to be soon. Just stay on that side of the counter if you’re worried about your virtue, princess. So what do you want?”

“We want you to come back, Ryan,” Weston said. 

“Not going to happen,” Ryan said. He took a long drink from his glass. 

“Look, I know you’re a mess, but you know Joe Carroll better than anyone,” Weston said. 

Ryan nodded solemnly. “That’s true. Answer’s still no.”

Weston slapped a hand down on the countertop in frustration. “Ryan! This is important.”

Ryan’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t know how much more clear I can be,” he said. “No. No. _No_. And if you ask me again, the answer is still going to be no. I’m tired of this. I’m tired of Joe Carroll and his cult and his kid and his fucking wife and I’m tired of doing your goddamn job for you.”

Weston blinked at him in surprise. “I thought you were in love with his wife,” he said. 

Ryan laughed. It was a sharp, mean bark of laughter, but it was real. “If you think that’s going to change my mind, well… it’s not. So, what else can I do for you, Weston?”

“Where do you think he’ll go now?” 

Ryan rolled his eyes and walked around the counter, silently directing Weston back toward the door. “No idea. It’s been nine years. Everything I know about him is old news.”

Weston spotted a book on a table and stopped to pick it up. It was the copy of _The Gothic Sea_ Joe had given Ryan all those years ago when they first met. The one Ryan had offered to give him twenty bucks for. He flipped it open and looked at the first title page. 

Ryan didn’t have to see it to know what it said. In Joe’s distinct handwriting; _I hope you get your man, Agent Hardy. Joe Carroll_

“Why do you have this?” Weston asked, closing the book. 

Ryan reached out and snatched it from his hand. “It was a gift,” he said. “Besides, do you have any idea how much this would go for on eBay right now?”

Weston frowned at him, looking between Ryan and the book. “We need your help,” he said. 

“Probably,” Ryan said. 

“Joe wants you involved,” Weston said. “What do you think he’ll do if you won’t play his game with him?”

Ryan shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe he’ll come after me. I’m the one he really wants, right?”

The idea seemed to have not occurred to Weston. He looked alarmed. “We should get agents on you. Someone to watch your place. What if he sends someone to—”

“Oh, please. He won’t,” Ryan said. “He could have killed me a hundred times yesterday. He had a gun two inches from my face. Go home, Weston.”

Weston stood in front of the door and didn’t open it. “I don’t get it,” he finally said.

“What don’t you get?”

“Why _won’t_ he kill you?”

Ryan leaned in and lowered his voice to a theatrical whisper, “We’re in love. Shh, don’t tell anyone.”

Weston scowled at him and waved a hand in front of his face. “Jesus, you really are drunk.”

“Mhmm, I know,” Ryan said dismissively. “Okay, time to go, Mikey. Tell the guys I said hi. You’ve interrupted my vodka nirvana long enough. Good luck and pleasant travels.”

He closed the door as Weston was turning back around, mouth already opening to say something else. Then he locked it and went back to the bedroom.

**2003**

Claire took Joey with her and spent the Fourth of July holiday with her family, but it was as much about getting away from Joe if Joe was to be believed. Joe was British and though thoroughly Americanized, he did not celebrate Independence Day. He saw it as a welcome respite from colicky baby screaming and resentful spouse glaring as well as a chance to have Ryan spend the long summer weekend with him in his house for a change. Ryan had to work the Friday of the 4th, but he arrived at Joe’s in the evening and they watched fireworks going off somewhere nearby from the back yard. They ordered takeout because Joe couldn’t cook and Ryan didn’t feel like it. When the fireworks stopped, they watched the fireflies come out.

Later, they went upstairs to what had become Joe’s bedroom when he and Claire had wordlessly agreed that he should leave the one they had once shared. It felt like everything was ending and Ryan could not have put his finger on why any more than he seemed able to shake the feeling. Like the subject of Claire and what Joe was going to do about it, Ryan did not mention it.

Joe fucked him on the side of the bed in front of the full-length mirror from his bathroom so that Ryan had to watch himself and Joe could watch himself and they could both watch each other together. Ryan sat on him, in his lap with his back to Joe and if he closed his eyes, Joe bit his shoulder or twisted his fingers in his hair and pulled, demanded that he look. There was a little shaving kit bag on the bedside table he had gotten from the bathroom when he went to retrieve the mirror and Joe picked it up. He took a set of curved needles out of it, selected one and showed it to Ryan. 

Ryan shivered and nodded his head. Joe smiled and kissed the side of his neck, mouthed and nipped at his ear with a pleased sound in his throat that rumbled between them. 

“Look at us, Ryan,” he murmured. 

Ryan looked and it sent a bolt of desire like a punch through his belly. He moaned and Joe flexed his hips and thrust, ground against him and dug his fingers into his hips to hold him steady. 

“Yes,” Joe whispered. He put the needle in his mouth to hold it in his teeth and it came out sounding like a hiss. “Yes, that’s it.”

Ryan rolled his hips into it and moved with him. He watched them in the mirror through his lowered lashes and the thrill of it, the decadence and depravity of it was like fingers twisting pleasurably at his insides. Joe was just there behind his shoulder like the devil side of his conscience and their eyes met. The needle he held in his mouth gleamed. 

“Do it,” Ryan said roughly. 

Joe ran the flat of his hand down Ryan’s back along the curve of his spine. “Do what, exactly?”

“Whatever you’re going to do with that needle,” Ryan said. He tipped his head back and rested it on Joe’s shoulder, turned his head to breathe against his jaw. “Do it.”

“You have to be exceptionally still, Ryan. It’s dangerous,” Joe said. 

Ryan smiled. “Of course it is,” he said. _We wouldn’t have it any other way, would we?_ “Do it.”

Joe pushed him forward over his knees and touched the needle to the middle of his back just to the right of his spine. He paused for Ryan to say something, to take it back or say the words, but Ryan took a deep breath and let it out. He became very still. Joe pushed the needle into his skin and Ryan shuddered lightly, but he didn’t move otherwise and he didn’t make a sound as it slid into his flesh and pierced it. When the little curved needle was through, the two ends sticking up from Ryan’s back like the curved points of a sickle, Joe flicked it. A drop of blood seeped from the hole around the needle and slid down Ryan’s back. Joe ducked his head to lick it, his tongue lingering over the rigid bump of skin where the needle was embedded. 

Ryan tensed, but he reached back to touch Joe’s arm, squeezed and said, “Again.”

Joe did it again. And again. He put needles in Ryan’s skin on either side of his spine until they ran from just below his shoulder blades to the small of his back. Ryan was insane with pleasure and pain before he was finished. He moaned and cursed him and begged him, though whether to stop or go on, he never said. Joe was hard inside of him through it all, but he had incredible control and did not thrust, though Ryan begged him for that, too. 

Joe touched his fingertips to the ends of the needles and ran his fingers down them like the strings on a harp. Ryan trembled, his skin twitched and jumped and he gasped. Smiling, Joe lowered his head and ran his tongue up the ridges of metal under his skin. Ryan was sweating and he couldn’t help but shake whenever the needles were touched, stimulating the nerves along his spine that reached out everywhere in his body. His entire body was alive with pain and the pleasure of it was a battering ram in time with his pulse. 

“Joe,” Ryan panted. “Joe, please. Joe, God, please do something. I’m losing my mind.”

Joe took Ryan’s hips in his hands and gently coaxed him into moving, rolling his hips with the motion of his hands in a slow, steady rhythm. Even that little bit of movement made his muscles tense, the skin move over them, the needles piercing his flesh moving with it. Ryan gasped and softly cried out, intense pain inciting intense pleasure in him that threatened to consume him. 

“Ryan, I want to ask you something,” Joe said. He nuzzled behind Ryan’s ear, his breath cooling the sweat on his neck making goosebumps course down Ryan’s shoulders, his sweaty hair clinging to Joe’s lips. “Ryan, it’s very important.”

“What?” Ryan hissed. He put his hand back to touch him and the shift of metal under his skin awakened sparks in his nerve endings. “Fuck. God, what, Joe? What do you want? Ask me.”

“Run away with me,” Joe said. 

It took Ryan a second to realize what he had said. Then he didn’t really believe he’d heard him right. “What?”

“Run away with me, Ryan,” he repeated. 

Ryan shook his head, not in negation, but trying to clear it. “I can’t. Joe, I can’t think about that now. I can’t.”

“Don’t think about it. What do you _want_ to do, Ryan?”

Ryan reached back and shoved him. “I want to finish this,” he said honestly. “I can’t think about anything else right now. Shut up. Just fuck me and shut up, Joe.”

Joe ran his hand up the back of Ryan’s neck and fisted it in his hair. He wrapped an arm around his waist and turned them, pulled out of him long enough to shove him down on the bed. With a growled, “Have it your way,” he pushed back inside of him and thrust. Ryan pushed back against him and met his thrusts and they set up a fast, rough pace. Joe’s chest against his back made the rows of needles up his spine move with them and the pain singing through every nerve in his body and Joe’s hard, relentless rhythm brought him to orgasm so quickly it took his breath away. Ryan bucked beneath him and came with a shout. Joe laughed and kept going. He set his teeth against the back of Ryan’s shoulder like an animal and held him as he fucked him through it. Ryan dragged the coverlet down the bed and fisted it in his hands, muffled his moans and cries in the blankets and shuddered all over. 

Joe moaned into Ryan’s shoulder when he came and ground his hips against his ass. He drew blood with the bite and licked over it as he was coming down and catching his breath. He sat back on his heels and let his head fall back on his shoulders, panting for breath. Ryan didn’t move and Joe looked down at him, at the ladders of needles going up his back. He smoothed his hand up Ryan’s back, fingers ticking over them, and Ryan moaned and hunched his shoulders against the sensation. 

Joe pulled out of him and rolled off him to lie on his back beside him.

After a few minutes, when the shivering had subsided and Ryan had caught his breath, he said, “I have to think about it.”

Joe slanted his eyes down to look at him and frowned. “How long?”

“I don’t know,” Ryan said. “It’s a lot to ask. To… burn down our lives. And do what then?”

Joe lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “No idea. Whatever we want.”

“I have to think about it. I can’t just… I can’t just leave.”

“Then think about it,” Joe said. He sighed out a breath and closed his eyes. “But don’t take too long, Ryan.”

Ryan put his chin on his folded arms and regarded him quietly, frowning. Eventually, he asked, “What are you running away from, Joe?”

Joe smirked, but he didn’t open his eyes. His lashes were long and shined under the yellow lamplight like raven feathers. “Nothing. And everything,” he said. “Haven’t you ever wanted to just start over? You know, hit the reset button and try again?”

“Is that what you hope I am? Your reset button?” Ryan asked. 

Joe put his hand down and petted it through Ryan’s sweat damp hair. “You’re much, much more than that.”

“You have a career, so do I,” Ryan said. 

Joe yawned. “Indeed.”

“You have a wife. You have a son.”

“It doesn’t matter. It all depends on you.”

“What about them?”

“Ryan, do you wish I cared more about them or _less_? They are not part of this and I hope not part of this _thinking_ you insist on doing.”

“Maybe they should be.”

Joe snorted. “It’s a simple request. Come away with me.”

“It’s really not that simple,” Ryan muttered. He put his head down on his arms. His back throbbed, but it was pleasant and warm, no longer arousing. “It’s a lot to ask.”

“It’s everything,” Joe agreed. “Go ahead and think about it. I’ll wait.”

“How long?” Ryan asked. 

“As long as it takes,” Joe said.

The phone ringing woke him up and Ryan slapped for it on the nightstand in the dark. He nearly sent it to the floor, but he caught it then answered it without bothering to check who it was. “I said no. I don’t care. I’m done helping you.”

“I haven’t asked for your help yet, Ryan, but that seems rather uncharitable of you,” Joe said. 

Ryan groaned and pushed himself up on his elbows in bed. “Joe?”

“Of course. Who else? So, you’ve withdrawn your assistance in apprehending me from the FBI? Dare I read anything into that?”

“Sure. I’m going to catch you myself. They just get in my way.”

“Ah, well, you don’t sound like you’re in any condition to come looking for me at the moment, so you’ll forgive me if I don’t find your threats very intimidating.”

“What do you want, Joe? How did you get this number?”

“I want what I’ve wanted for a long time now, Ryan. Do you remember?”

“No.”

“Liar,” Joe hissed, chiding. “I think you’ve had more than enough time to think about it. As for where I got this number, well… I have friends, as I’ve mentioned. They’re quite resourceful.”

There was a part of Ryan who was glad to be able to talk to Joe at last without the word play and innuendo. It was odd when he realized he didn’t have much to say to him without it though. “I’m hanging up, Joe.”

“Come now, Ryan. Don’t be angry. Don’t you feel more alive? You’ve been dying, I could tell.”

“How? You haven’t seen or talked to me in nine years. Don’t tell me you’re telepathic.”

“Oh please. We _are_ connected, there’s no point lying to yourself about that, but I don’t have to be clairvoyant to know what a mess you’ve made of yourself without me.”

“How?” Ryan asked, suspicious.

“Friends are useful, Ryan. You never did figure that out,” Joe said. “I’ve been keeping an eye on you. I’m what you might call _invested_.”

“You’ve been spying on me.”

“Well, you don’t answer my letters.”

“Your letters were blank.”

Joe laughed. “Oh, come now, Ryan. You know better.”

“Blank pages with blood on them.”

“They were symbolic!” Joe snapped.

“Yeah, I got that,” Ryan said. He felt around on the floor beside the bed for his bottle of vodka. He found it and unscrewed the cap. “As metaphors go, it was a little obvious. Nine spots of blood for nine years on death row. I got it.” He drank.

“You are goading me,” Joe said. “It won’t work.”

Ryan smiled around the mouth of the bottle, swallowed and put it down. “If you say so, darlin’.”

“How intoxicated _are_ you?” Joe demanded.

“Oh… a lot,” Ryan said. “Really intoxicated. I’m thinking I might go on a bender before I start looking for you again, so you should probably shag ass somewhere far away. I’ll give you a head start.”

“That is very tempting,” Joe said dryly. “However, I’m not going anywhere just yet, Ryan.”

Ryan sighed. “What do you want, Joe?”

“The same thing I wanted from you yesterday. And the day before that. And the day before that. And… Well, you get the idea.”

“Mhmm. You want what? My forgiveness? _Me?_ ”

“I always want you, Ryan, but I want you to see and know who you are. You’re the hero. What does that mean?”

Ryan opened his mouth to say something, though he didn’t know what, but the phone clicked in his hand and Joe was gone. With a grumbling sound of annoyance, he dropped it on the bed and picked up his bottle. He drank for a little while then pulled his pillow up, wrapped his arms around it and went back to sleep.

The phone rang again an hour later. 

Ryan snatched it off the bed and answered it. “What?”

“Have you figured it out yet, Ryan?”

“Goddamn it, Joe. Figured out _what_?”

“You’re the hero,” Joe said patiently. “What does that mean?”

“You’re not going to let me sleep this off anytime soon, are you?” Ryan asked. He rubbed his face with his free hand. “Okay. I give up. What does it mean?”

“You’re nothing without me,” Joe said. 

Ryan coughed out a laugh. “Oh, yeah? How do you figure?”

“Haven’t you felt more alive recently?”

“Not this shit again, Joe. Come on.”

“A hero is nothing without a villain just as a villain is nothing without a hero,” Joe said. “You get a pathetic, useless waste of one man without a cause and a pointless, irrelevant ghoul locked away and forgotten with no hero to hunt him. They give each other purpose. What would you do without me, Ryan?” He paused thoughtfully. “Oh, wait. Never mind.”

“You don’t have to worry about that. I’ll come after you,” Ryan said. “You have my word.”

“Oh, don’t get yourself all worked up about it, Ryan. I’m not going very far.”

There was a knock at Ryan’s front door and he cursed. He was ever so damn popular lately. It was really getting on his nerves. 

“We’re going to have to continue this circular as fuck conversation another time, Joe,” he said. “I gotta go.”

“Shut up and go answer the door, Ryan,” Joe said. 

He hung up on him again and Ryan sat on the side of the bed frowning at his phone for a minute. The knock came again, more insistently. 

“Yeah, yeah, hold on!” Ryan called. He tossed the phone down and pulled his ratty bathrobe on. “I’m coming!”

He went to the door and pulled it open, expecting to find Mike again or even Debora Parker. Instead, Joe stood there and when Ryan opened the door, he lowered the hood of a black sweater to let him see. There was no mistake, it was Joe. He would have known him in the dark by the shape of his silhouette alone.

Several options flittered through Ryan’s mind and were discarded in succession. He could slam the door in his face and lock it. He could go for his gun on the counter at the end of the hallway just inside the kitchen. He could run or fight, subdue him, arrest him, finish this shit and kill him. 

“You’re not real,” Ryan decided. He was drunk as hell after all. Much too drunk for this. He was having some kind of inebriated delusion, he decided. “I’m dreaming. I’m having a really fucked up dream, that’s what this is. Makes sense, too. I mean, who calls the guy trying to catch them on the phone? _Twice_?”

He started to close the door, thinking he’d go back to bed and probably wake up feeling like utter crap very soon. 

Joe put his foot in the door and Ryan couldn’t close it against his boot. “Ryan, I am here.”

“No, you’re not,” Ryan insisted. “I drank too much. This happens.”

Joe raised an eyebrow at him. “ _This_ happens?”

“Well, not _this_ I guess, but… you know.”

Joe took hold of the door and pushed, forcing it open and making Ryan step back. “You are very drunk,” Joe decided. “I’m not standing out here in the hallway, so move, Ryan. I’m coming inside. We’ll talk about this in there.”

“There is nothing to talk about,” Ryan said. 

Joe was stronger than him now, especially in his dream. That was probably just because he was the bad guy in this dream and it was a nightmare. It might also have been because Joe had been in prison for nine years with ample free time for pushups, but he was still hoping he wasn’t real. Joe forced the door open and entered the apartment. Then he locked the door and they stood looking at each other. 

“This isn’t happening,” Ryan said. He was starting to think it _was_ happening though. 

Joe spread his hands out at his sides. “Yes, it is. I am really here, Ryan.”

“So you keep saying. It’s very existential of you,” Ryan said. “Fake Existential Joe.”

Joe grinned. His hand darted out and he smacked Ryan hard across the face. “Feel that?”

Ryan rubbed his cheek and ran his tongue along his bottom teeth. He tasted blood. “Yes,” he said.

Joe smacked him again, other hand, other cheek. Ryan jerked his head back, blood sliding down his throat, his cheeks cut from his own teeth. There was a light in Joe’s eyes that wasn’t vengeance at all and Ryan knew very well what it meant. He turned his head and spit blood on the floor. The blood spotted the pale carpet with crimson. Joe walked toward him and Ryan backed down the short hallway away from him, their eyes locked, that old, familiar awareness and understanding right there between them as loud and clear as ever. 

His gun was on the corner of the countertop where he always put it when he came home. Right there with his keys. He could probably get to it before Joe could stop him. 

“So?” Joe asked. 

“So, what?” Ryan asked. 

“I asked you something and I would like an answer,” Joe said. “It was summer. You interrupted me and arrested me a couple of weeks later and you never did give me an answer. I’ve been very patient with you, Ryan. You’ve had quite a lot of time to think about it.”

He was insane, Ryan thought. He knew precisely what Joe was talking about, but that he should still be waiting for Ryan to answer him after all this time, after everything, that was madness. It was a trick. It had to be. He couldn’t be serious. 

Joe’s hand came up again, but this time Ryan caught his wrist and stopped him. “We’ll be hunted for the rest of our lives,” he said. 

“Yes, that’s true,” Joe said. “Forever. Wherever we go. Wherever we turn. Someone will come looking for us, to kill us or lock us away, to _stop_ us.”

Ryan nodded. He lifted the hand not on Joe’s wrist to wipe blood from the corner of his mouth. He thought about it and it didn’t frighten him, it didn’t shame him. It excited him. He met Joe’s gaze and saw the understanding of that in his eyes. Understanding and acceptance. “Yes.”

Joe blinked. “Yes what?”

Ryan reached out and grabbed him, pulled him into his arms and kissed him with the metallic tang of blood on his tongue. Joe seized hold of him with a feral growl of longing and pent-up desire and backed him up to the wall as he kissed him back. Ryan smelled like whiskey and sweat and blood and Joe kissed him like he intended to sink right though him. 

He forced himself to stop and ask again, “Yes what, Ryan? Tell me.”

“On one condition,” Ryan said instead of answering him.

“What condition?” Joe asked. 

“Give the kid back. Joey,” Ryan said. 

Joe rolled his eyes. “Ever the noble hero, Ryan. Why should I?”

“Because he’ll get in the way. Because we don’t want children.”

“Well… that is certainly true. I don’t want him. I wanted to use him and he was useful, but I suppose… Fine. I’ll drop him in a dumpster behind a church if that makes you happy. Now tell me, yes _what_?”

“I’ll go with you. I’ll run away with you,” Ryan said. He smiled and pulled Joe’s head back toward him. “I surrender,” he whispered and kissed him again. 

He imagined he could smell the sulfur of the world burning around them as Joe’s tongue slipped into his mouth. He ran his hands over the scars he had put into Joe’s skin, marking his ownership of him into his flesh forever as Joe bit a new brand into the side of his neck. Joe had him trapped against the wall and he had never felt more alive and free.


End file.
